HB 



liiilllisps 



.A- v. -v~\>~:J :/U 



i ■ - ' : * ■ 
■■--■■•. 

..'■"-'.':■ 



■9 



as 









LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

BXW5- 

Cfpp- Gapijrigljt !fuu 

sheif ;Ai6-3 77 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



§>pans$iguraHon of Hifp 



AiND OTHER SERMONS 



BY 

THE REV. EDWARD S. ATWOOD, D.D. 

ii 



31 Memorial IMume 



I o b * 




BOSTON AND CHICAGO 
(Congregational Sunoap=Sd)ooI ano iPtifalisfjtng Soctetg 



\ 



. ptztzTF 



I ' vowomJ 



Copyright, 1888, by 

CONGREGATIONAL SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND PDBLISHING SOCIETY 



Electrotyped and Printed by 
Stanley A Usher, 111 Devonshire Street, Boston, Mass. 



I 



* Wit borjage together for a little fofjile, 
Hlong tfje natfjfoags of tije restless sea, 
But fofjen tfye forJccme sfjore is gaineo 

Wit part. $e it not so 
EHJjen o'er trje stormier tioes of life 
Wit eaefj rjabe passett : tfjen on tfje eternal strantr 
OgetJjer anti foreber mag be stanti. 

E. S. ATWOOD. 



♦In passengers' note-book, on board Steamer William Penn, Atlantic 
voyage, June, 1867. 



Boston, May, 1888. 
Dear Mrs. Atwood : — 

When the Monday Club met on May 21st, though all within 
reach were present, the numbers were not full. Two were on 
the great waters; but we thought most of the one who had 
pushed out across the narrow stream, this side the land where 
there is no more sea. We had been very near to each other in 
spirit the past few days. . . . So we sat together and talked of 
him, all that he was to us, his fresh wit arid genial humor, his 
abounding friendliness, his manly faith in Christ, and Christ- 
like love for men. We spoke of his presence and share in the 
great gatherings of the Church, his glowing pleas for noble 
causes. How well we knew that keen insight, broad judgment, 
and marvelotis gift of speech. . . . We want to ask you to grant 
us some memorial of this friend of ours and of so many : a 
book which shall keep chosen sermons, tell something of his life, 
and perhaps give the features of the bright vanished face. 
Some of our number will consult with you and, if the request is 
granted, try to relieve you of all care in this loving work. . . . 
Faithfully yours, 

Charles M. Southgate. William B. Campbell. 

Addison P. Foster. Edward B. Mason. 

David Gregg. David O. Mears. 

Frank E. Clark. W. G. Sperry. 

William Elliot Griffis. A. E. Dunning. 

Theodore J. Holmes. De Witt S. Clark. 
George M. Boynton. 



To the Monday Club : — 

Your note, so full of kindest sympathy, has been received, 

and I wish to thank you for it. . . . The thoughtful and gener- 

ous request for the materials for a "memorial" volume will be 

granted by us all, most willingly, and of course we shall be very 

glad to aid you in any way that seems best. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Elizabeth M. Atwood, 
Salem, June, 1888. 



IN MEMORIAM. 



This memorial, of our brother's own creating, is only- 
set in place by loving hands. They, simply carving his 
name upon it, know how much better his taste and still 
would have chosen its site and surroundings ; but it will 
be noticeable anywhere. Other and possibly finer mate- 
rials might be selected, for he was prodigal in such work, 
though never thinking of his own fame the while. What 
he planned not for, friendship must secure. To keep a 
little longer— at least for the generation that knew him, 
either personally or by reputation — the gifted mind and 
heart, though the graceful and noble form in which they 
dwelt has been forever caught away from us, is the pur- 
pose of this volume. " He being dead, yet speaketh," 
not in memory merely, but to many now, perchance, 
who never saw him in the flesh. He may preach as per- 
tinently, beautifully, persuasively, as ever. It is our 
privilege to give the mute lips voice. 

Edward Sumner Atwood was born in Taunton, 
Massachusetts, June 4, 1833. His parents were of that 
strong, intellectual Christian type not rare in New Eng- 
land, and prominent in church and social circles. He 
was graduated with honors at Brown University in 1852. 
Lik«' the earlier ( hrysostom, he abandoned the career of 
the rhetorician, for which he seemed to have peculiar 
fitness, for the higher duties of the gospel ministry. 
Graduating from the Andover Theological Seminary in 
L866, he was ordained pastor of the Congregational 



MEMOBIAL. 7 

church at Grantville (now Wellesley Hills), Massachu- 
setts, October 23, the same year. Of his service there 
for eight years, his successor said: "In the enthusiasm 
of his youth-time, at the age of twenty-three, he came to 
the pastorate in this place to help you in all the best and 
holiest things. And he did help you. Some of you send 
to him in his too early tomb, or, rather, in the glorious 
home to which he has passed through it, the memorial of 
your thanks for many an uplifting word, many a 
brotherly prayer, with which he tried to start you, or 
to keep you on the way to that land of light into which 
he has so quickly preceded you. You have to thank God 
for a good pastor in hini." 

In 1861 he was called as colleague with the venerable 
Brown Emerson, d.d., of the South Congregational 
Church, in Salem, Massachusetts. The full duties of 
the pastorate soon devolved upon him, which he dis- 
charged till the very clay of his death. It was a period 
of labor, like the path of the just, growing brighter and 
more valuable to its close, which was to him the perfect 
day. 

A brilliant writer, through whose vigorous and thought- 
ful sentences there played a keen humor; a most en- 
gaging speaker, having always the felicitous word upon 
his tongue; an able organizer and executor, carrying 
plan and detail to its happy and successful issue, ready 
for any task that could bring help or comfort to the bur- 
dened ; a sympathetic friend of old and young, of the 
eminent and the obscure, he grew into an assured and 
most important position in a community where talent 
and worth were not exceptional. The public schools of 
his city were the broader in culture and the more efficient 
for his generous counsels. He was originator, secretary, 
or president, through nearly its entire history, of the 
Essex Congregational Club. The great missionary so- 
cieties of the denomination sought him; the American 



8 MEM0B1AL. 

Board, as a member of its Prudential Committee; the 
Massachusetts Bible Society, as a trustee; association, 
convention, and council, as preacher and speaker; while 
upon him came very naturally and " daily, those things 
that are without, the care of all the churches. " His 
Alma Mater very properly honored him with the degree 
of Doctor of Divinity in 1883. A representative of the 
best forms of our intense modern life, his physical powers, 
as is too often the case, faltered under the strain to which 
they were put. Subject to frequent and serious attacks 
of disease, the fatal summons came on Saturday after- 
noon, May 13, 1888, as he sat at the table with his family. 
Calling for them to gather about him as he consciously 
passed into the shadows, he sunk peacefully away and 
yielded up his spirit before the morning broke. 

" I like to preach," he once said to a brother minister. 
" When I get to heaven I don't know what I shall do if I 
don't have a chance." Had he forgotton the varied calls 
and services on which the ministering spirits of God are 
sent? Beethoven's dream of the celestial orchestra which 
he might conduct was a normal one, but not more so 
than ours, of vast multitudes listening to the glowing 
speech of him whose lips, touched with the coal from off 
the altar, are publishing as from no pulpit of earth, " the 
glorious gospel of the blessed God." 



CONTENTS. 



i. 

PAGE 

The Transfiguration of Life 11 

(A Sermon for Every Day.) 

II. 

The Divine Christ 29 

(A Sermon of Doctrine.) 

III. 
The Contested Will 51 

(A Sermon from the Court-room.) 

IV. 

The Sons of God 75 

(A Sermon to Christians.) 

V. 

"Nothing but Leaves" 93 

(A Sermon from Nature.) 

VI. 

What Shall This Child Be? Ill 

(A Sermon for Children.) 



10 CONTENTS. 

VII. 

Beloved for the Fathers' Sake . . . .127 

(A Sermon for Parents.) 

VIII. 

The Messenger and the Message . . . .149 

(An Ordination Sermon.) 

IX. 
Glory and Beauty 175 

(A Sermon for Ministers.) 

X. 

Debtor to the World 197 

(A Missionary Sermon.) 

XI. 

The Stone at the Door ...... 221 

(An Easter Sermon.) 



I. 

%\)t Ctanjsftgurattou'of life. 



I. 

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF LIFE. 

" And after six days Jesus taketh xvith him Peter and James 
and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by 
themselves: and he teas transfigured before them.'''' — Mark 9 : 2. 

TT was not without reason that a mountain was 
-*~ selected as the locality of this remarkable in- 
cident in the history of our Lord. It was directly 
in the line of long precedent. From the begin- 
ning of the world the most signal manifestations 
of God had been made on lonely summits. It was 
on the peaks of Ararat that the covenant was 
made with Noah, and the glittering bow arched 
from horizon to horizon the seal set to the divine 
promise. It was on the bald shoulder of Moriah 
that the angel of Jehovah appeared to Abraham, 
and the rude altar which the patriarch built there 
was the hint and prophecy of the great temple 
which afterwards crowned the slope. It was on 
the towering heights of Sinai that God gave the 
law to Moses. It was among the awful crags of 
Horeb that the Lord strong and mighty passed by 

13 



14 THE TBANSFIGUBATION OF LIFE. 

before the prophet. It was on the crest of Cal- 
vary that the Redeemer was appointed to die. 
It was to be the culmination of the latter day glory 
that the mountain of the Lord's house should be 
exalted above the tops of the mountains. It was 
quite in accordance with the divine method of 
procedure that the manifestation of the deity of 
Jesus Christ should be made on a " high moun- 
tain apart." 

Aside from the warrant of ancient custom, and 
perhaps the explanation of that custom, a moun- 
tain is especially adapted to these unique and 
striking revelations. There is completest solitude 
and silence, no sight or sound of the busy world 
to divert the attention of the man to whom God 
is pleased to disclose himself. There is pure air 
on these high-lifted slopes, no smoke or mist to 
distort or confuse the vision. There is a sugges- 
tion of other-worldliness in the gray stillness ; the 
strife and fret of life have receded into remote 
distance, and the heavens have come nearer. So 
far as the influence of physical surroundings is 
concerned, no place so suitable as a mountain to 
lit a man to see and hear God. 

There was, however, one peculiarity about this 
transfiguration of Jesus Christ of special impor- 



THE TRANSFIGURATION OF LIFE. 15 

tance. In other instances when God revealed 
himself to men, it was as a God outside of and 
apart from them, but it was the God in Jesus 
Christ who manifested himself in the splendor of 
the transfiguration. And very evidently the man 
Christ Jesus had something to do with bringing 
about that revelation. He was conscious that 
there was more to him than appeared on the sur- 
face ; that though to others he seemed only a man 
he was more than man, and he determined at the 
proper time and in a fit way to let his favorite 
disciples know what he knew so well himself. 
He could accomplish that purpose only under 
certain conditions, and one of those conditions 
seems to have been the choice of a proper place 
for the unveiling of his hidden glory, and what 
place so suitable as a high mountain apart? 
Nothing here to distract his thoughts, no crowd of 
lame and blind waiting to be healed, no accusers 
and ciitics challenging him to the sharp battle of 
question and answer, only the silent sky over him 
and the quiet night about him and the troubled 
world below him. He realized more vividly who 
he was, than he ever could in the daytime and 
in the noisy streets. Here in the solitude and 
stillness and remoteness from ordinary human 



16 THE TnAXSFiaUBATION OF LIFE. 

cares, lie could rise to that supreme act of will, by 
which his inner nature was enabled to break 
through the confinement of his physical body 
and stand disclosed in all its wonder and splendor. 
A high mountain apart! Jesus Christ was no 
stranger to the possibilities of a place like that. 
He went up on to a mountain to teach his dis- 
ciples and on to a mountain to pray for strength 
for himself. He knew the spiritual atmosphere of 
such localities. What other place should he 
select for the great marvel of the Transfigura- 
tion ? 

What was true of Jesus Christ is in a measure 
true of all of us. There is more to every man 
than appears at first sight and on the surface, 
These common lives which we live ourselves, 
and which we see lived all about us, are capable 
of being far broader and nobler and more wonder- 
ful. There are times when we are conscious of 
the fact. When now and then we sit down and 
think back over our past, and call up our weak- 
nesses and failures and sins, and see what poor 
work we have made of living, we every one of us 
say to ourselves that we might have made a better 
record. There was no need that we should 
blunder and stumble in such wretched fashion. As 



THE TRANSFIGUBATIOX OF LIFE. 17 

often pedestrians push and struggle and wander 
here and there for hours through the underbrush, 
and coming to some point of prospect, look back 
and see that there was one straight short path 
which they have missed, and have wasted time 
and strength in useless divergence to the right 
and left : so in moments of reflection, thoughtful 
men discover that they have not made the most of 
themselves, nor of their opportunities, that results 
in character are not at all proportionate to the 
force that has been expended. And every man is 
at the same time conscious that there is in him, 
and always has been, a wealth of sensibility and 
capacity and inwrought and infolded energy and 
possibility, which has never seen the light or 
been seen of men. You know what I mean. Is 
there one of us who would be perfectly satisfied 
with the world's estimate of us, if that estimate 
was based wholly and strictly on what we have 
already reached in character or accomplished in 
work ? No, we say, and without conceit we have 
a right to say, there is more to us and better than 
we yet have shown. It is our own fault, doubtless, 
that we have made so poor an exhibit, but all the 
same and nevertheless there is that in us which is 
grander and higher than the best and most which 



18 THE TBANSFIGUBATIOy OF LIFE. 

we have yet seen and done. It consoles us some- 
times in our failures, to think that our lack of 
success has been due to weakness of will and 
errors of judgment, and not to deficiency of 
natural capacity, for that thought brightens the 
future with the light of large hope, but it oftener 
and with better reason saddens us to remember 
that with so much of material and so many 
chances of masterly achievement, we have made 
such journeyman's work of living. It is the great 
sorrow of human experience that it is consciously 
so much poorer in quality, and narrower in 
breadth, and less satisfying to recall, than it either 
need or ought to have been. 

And so the great practical truth of which we 
all now and then get dim and partial glimpses 
grows sharp in outline and august in reality, — 
the possibility of the Transfiguration of Life, — in 
which the best that is in us, with the help of the 
best that is for us, the grace of God, shall get 
uppermost and outermost, and instead of being, 
as we so often are, the mere hints and suggestions 
of the men and women we were meant to be, all 
our immortal capacities will unfold and the divine 
grace and beauty which belongs to them will 
disclose itself and shine through the dust and 



THE TBANSFIGUBATIOX OF LIFE. 19 

smoke of earthly surroundings, as the glory of the 
true Christ shone through the night shadows that 
shrouded the Holy Mount. 

The poets sing to us now and then of a golden 
age to come, when humanity shall unmistakably 
evidence its divine origin, when men and women 
shall lose their selfishness and frivolity, their bitter- 
ness of spirit and narrowness of vision, and life 
shall be stately and calm and strong, and earth 
so like heaven that it will matter little where 
we are, whether here or there ; and we are 
pleased to listen to the pathetic strains, but slow 
to believe, and with our hard matter-of-fact expe- 
rience of this hard matter-of-fact world we say 
that these are a rhymester's dreams, not to be 
numbered among our hopes and certainly not 
to be accepted as our faith. And yet the 
possibility of a larger fulfillment than the largest 
prophecy, at least in personal experience, is 
face to face with every one of us. Not a man 
or woman here but may commence now and 
here the process that shall end in transfiguration; 
their hidden capacities quickened in action ; the 
dim sparks of heavenliness within them kindled 
into clear and shining flame , the best possible to 
them actually realized, so that when seen in the 
home or the street, or the shops or the house of 



20 THE TBAXSFIGUBATIOX OF LIFE. 

worship, the world shall say of each of them, 
"There lives and moves a true child of God, in 
fashion like ourselves, but in temper and attain- 
ment most like Him who made them." 

And mind you, friends, I am not talking about 
something fanciful or indifferent, but about a 
truth most practical that relates to a matter most 
practical. The world is always trying to better 
its condition. It inaugurates multitudes of enter- 
prises, enlarges trade and commerce, brings new 
acres under cultivation, prospects and mines 
for mineral treasures hidden under the soil, 
increases its store of literature, lengthens the 
catalogue of its useful inventions, is ingenious 
and patient in its experiments, but after all never 
reaches the betterment which it desires. The 
trouble is, it is working in the wrong direction ; 
trying to add the most possible to what men have, 
instead of trying to make the most possible of 
what men are ; and simple accumulation is not 
the medicine for the universal heart-sickness of 
humanity. 

We call our age one of marvelous privilege in 
its varied and wonderful ministries to so many 
shades of the common want, and yet to-day, even 
among the most favored classes in society, you find 



THE TBANSFIGUBATION OF LIFE. 21 

the same unrest and dissatisfaction of which men 
complained in earlier and ruder times. Wealth 
and taste line the streets with fine houses, and the 
people who live in them, in spite of their luxuri- 
ous surroundings, are groping and hungering for 
something to satisfy their unappeased cravings. 
Men seek relief for their discontent in change of 
scene, but their souls travel farther and faster 
than their bodies ; their unrest outruns the loco- 
motive and the steamship, and though they sit 
under the shadow of the great mountains, or walk 
within hearing of the infinite laughter of the sea, 
or mingle with the gay congress of pleasure- 
seekers which midsummer assembles, yet in frank 
hours they confess that they have not found the con- 
tent they seek. What fugitive from his home can 
escape from himself? The mind is its own place. 
It was the experience of the Transfiguration 
that prepared Jesus Christ for the patient and 
even joyful endurance of the sorrows of Geth- 
semane and the pains of Calvary. It is only 
as men in their measure come into that same 
experience, by the outgrowth and overgrowth of 
the spiritual part of their nature, so that their 
immortality asserts itself in opposition to all the 
vexations and disquietudes of life, that they grow 



22 THE TBANSFIGUBATION OF LIFE. 

into serenity, and into that just estimate of rela- 
tive values which enables them out of simple 
content of heart to say, " None of these things 
move me." 

But men never drift nor vegetate into trans- 
figuration. It is reached only under conditions. 
There must be an intelligent comprehension of 
the end to be attained before intelligent measures 
to secure it can be taken. And for this men, like 
their Lord, must go up into a " high mountain 
apart." They must get away from the stir and 
confusion of busy life, and above the level of the 
debased estimates of popular theories, and look at 
and judge of things as they appear in the stillness 
and solitude and clear air of nearness to God. 

No man ever comes into the experience of this 
transfigured life without much real reflection, and 
that is a rare thing. There is a great deal of 
thinking done in the world, but there is very little 
thoughtfulness. Our estimate of most things is 
superficial ; our estimate of ourselves most super- 
ficial of all. The hours which we really give to 
profound searching of our personal needs and 
defects and possibilities are like mountains apart 
in their infrequency, and much more like moun- 
tains apart in the revelations and prospect which 



THE TBANSFIGUBATION OF LIFE. 23 

their summits command. It is useless to hope 
for great spiritual attainments without long and 
profound communion with our own souls. The 
social life of our day is wonderfully stimulating, 
but it is unhealthy just so far as it discredits 
solitude and makes it seem tame and undesirable. 
It is when we keep close company with ourselves 
that we find out what we really are and, better 
still, what we may be and were meant to be. It 
was the testimony of the Psalmist : " While I was 
musing the fire burned, then spake I with my lips, 
Lord make me to know mine end." In our care- 
less moods it is easy to think well of ourselves 
and to believe that we have made a long advance 
towards the perfection possible to us, but the 
deeper search of earnest thoughtfulness reveals 
to us how many of the higher capacities of our 
nature are undeveloped, not to say untouched, as 
yet, and the largeness of the life to which we may 
grow unfolds itself before us, as river and forest 
and lake and plain and village and wilderness 
unroll themselves in far-stretching landscape to 
one standing on some mountain summit. More 
thoughtfulness, dear friends, I plead for that; a 
better understanding of ourselves, a clearer com- 
prehension of what God made us to be and 



24 THE TBANSFIQUBATION OF LIFE. 

become. It is the inspiration and impulse that 
leads men to strive for a glorified life. 

And along with that, and as an indispensable 
accompaniment to that, we need to go up on the 
high places of God's Word and see how things 
look from that point of view. The Scriptures are 
unique in many things, but in nothing more 
unique than in their estimate of men and their 
teachings of the proper use and true end of life. 
It is too much the fashion and the folly of this 
age to criticize the New Testament as antiquated 
and fanatical. It is true that its judgment of 
character and scheme of conduct is in broad 
contrast to the theories of living which the world 
at large adopts and commends, but it is to be 
remembered that whatever else the New Testa- 
ment may or may not be, it is God's idea of 
human responsibilities and capabilities. If modern 
society objects to its outline and color, so much 
the worse for modern society. Its dissent does 
not alter the truth. It is when and only when 
men adjust their lives to the declared conditions 
of the God who made them and rules them that 
the forces of those lives have swift and easy play, 
and one after the other their possibilities develop 
into actual experiences, as the blossoms of lily 



THE TRANSFIGURATION OF LIFE. 25 

and rose unfurl their jDetals of crimson and pearl 
under the mighty impulses of growth and in the 
favoring light of the summer sun. There is no 
transfiguration of life possible to men who live on 
a lower level than this high mountain apart of 
Scripture. Their largest accomplishment is inev- 
itably of the earth earthy. " Make all things," 
God said to Moses, " after the pattern shewed 
thee in the mount." Make all things in life, God 
says to men everywhere, after the pattern shown 
in this mount of the Holy Word ; and individual 
character, and home behavior, and business con- 
duct, and intellectual attainment, and social activ- 
ities shall have on them the dawn and grow fast 
towards the fullness of the splendor of the perfect 
life of the heavens and the ineffable glory of 
God. 

I stood two Sabbath nights ago on one of the 
slopes of the New Hampshire ranges, at the close 
of a cold gray day through whose long hours 
storm and brightness had been battling for posses- 
sion of the sky. The heavens were slated with 
handbreadths of cloud overlapping each other, 
the breath of mist was in the air, the drops of 
the spent rain were dripping from the trees, the 
remoter peaks were scarcely distinguishable, the 



26 THE TRANSFIGURATION OF LIFE. 

nearer summits were sullen and forbidding, the 
scenes seemed set for the funeral of a dead world. 
But the day was not to go out in that mournful 
fashion. Suddenly by some breath of God the 
veil of obscurity was rent in twain from top to 
bottom, and in the uncovered light of the sun, 
unspeakable glories kindled and flamed. Each 
smallest cloud stood out in separate distinctness, 
an island with inland of crimson and beach of 
gold, and in and out through all the shining arch- 
ipelago there was the wash and flow of amber 
seas. The mountains, flooded with purple light, 
were pyramids of amethyst and jasper. The air 
was tremulous and scintillant with motes of 
brightness. Patches of rainbow drifted here and 
there and vanished in a blaze of color. Look up 
or down, east or west, nowhere was found a spot 
untouched by the transfiguration of the hour, and 
I knew by actual vision what God could make of 
this old and worn earth. 

But, beloved, what was that compared with 
knowing by experience what the transfiguration of 
life means? To so put ourselves and do our work 
in the light of the Sun of Righteousness that every 
thing in us shall share in his brightness ; to have 
our needs and sorrows illumined with his gracious 



THE TBANSFIGUBATIOX OF LIFE. 27 

love ; to see his grace make the humblest duty and 
the lowliest lot something fair and pleasant ; to 
feel within us the uplift and thrill of the growth of 
God-likeness ; to know that all that we are and do 
is becoming more and more divine in men's thought 
about us ; to be conscious of increase of spiritual 
power and enlargement of character, — this is no 
fleeting glory of sunset skies that charms for a 
moment and is gone, but the beginning of eternal 
day. To witness that is your privilege and mine. 
Do we believe in it ? Do we long for it ? Will 
we strive for it ? This is living worth the name. 
May God turn all our hearts and faces towards it ! 



II. 



II. 



THE DIVINE CHRIST. 

"In him was life ; and the life icas the light of men. And the 
light shineth in the darkness ; and the darkness apprehended it 
not. But as many as received him, to them gave he the right to 
become the children of God,, even to them that believe on his 
name:' — Johx 1 : 4, 5, 12. 

riHHERE can be no reasonable question as to 
-*- who it is of whom these words are spoken. 
This opening chapter of John's Gospel is a blend- 
ing of simplicity and sublimity, a series of progres- 
sive statements, each lifting our thought a step 
higher, and each irradiated with the light that 
streams from him to whom they all lead, Jesus 
Christ the Son of God. Notice how the stately 
prologue commences and proceeds. " In the begin- 
ning was the Word." At once we are back in the 
silence and mystery of the far eternities, before 
the earth was. What else or who else there may 
have been in the dim solitude of that ancient 
epoch, we do not know, but " in the beginning 
was the Word, and the Word was with God." 
Not merely in the same place with him. Both 

31 



32 THE DIVIXE CUEIST. 

the etymology and the grammatical construction 
forbid that limitation of meaning. The most 
intimate and divine sort of relation is indicated, 
inseparable nearness, and closest intercommunion; 
something like what we mean, when we say that 
a man is alone with himself. At the same time 
the phrase is so far obscure that it admits of a 
double interpretation, and this is a point in regard 
to which there must be no possible room for 
rational doubt, and so at the next step comes the 
statement, " And the Word was God.'' 

That declaration is absolutely without Haw or 
seam in its wholeness ; the frve words in which it 
is made are bolted and riveted into the unity of a 
single block. They can mean only one thing ; no 
torturing nor twisting can wring out of them any 
other significance besides that which lies on the 
face of them. Exhaust all the resources of human 
language, and you can not invent any phrase which 
will more forcibly and unmistakably assert the 
absolute Deity of this somebody who is called 
"the Word," than the simple statement of reve- 
lation, " And the Word was God.*' Let me find 
out who it is whom the inspired apostle calls 
"the Word," and in all honesty and all reason I 
must acknowledge him Lord, and worship him as 



THE DIVINE CHBIST. 33 

my Maker and my King. We do not have to 
wait long, for the evangelist goes on, " And the 
Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we 
beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten 
from the Father), full of grace and truth." Is 
there any possible doubt as to who it is of whom 
John is speaking ? In the long course of human 
history has there ever been but one being who 
claimed to be the only begotten Son of God. It 
is a part of the common knowledge that Jesus 
Christ alone of men made that claim. Your little 
child is just as well acquainted with the fact as 
the philosopher or the theologian, and the apostle 
John says that this " Word made flesh," this Jesus 
Christ, was " in the beginning " and " was God." 
If you admit that the Bible is a divine revelation, 
and are willing to reverently accept and believe 
what that Bible teaches, and will deal in honest 
fashion with its plain and simple statements, there 
is but one way in which you can read this opening 
chapter of John's Gospel, and only one conclusion 
to which you can come in regard to Jesus Christ ; 
and that is, that he is the divine Redeemer and 
Lord. 

And this conclusion is so inevitable that those 
who are in the habit of asserting that Jesus Christ 



34 THE DIVINE CHRIST. 

is not God are anxious to find some way of 
getting rid of this portion of the Gospel, or at 
least to break the force of its statements. So 
there are some who, with great display of pre- 
tended scholarship, declare that the evidence of 
the genuineness of this Gospel is defective. It is 
an old artifice to get a troublesome witness out of 
the way. The claims of the Gospel of John to be 
a true Word of God have been in court century 
after century. They have been subjected to 
merciless criticism, they have been assailed with 
the bitterness of party spirit, but they have never 
been disproved. The Christian world has not 
yet seen any good reason for laying aside or 
doubting this precious portion of the New Testa- 
ment. It still stands serene, supreme, immovable 
in the judgment and affections of those who 
sincerely desire to know the mind and will of God, 
and its teachings stand with it. Its words of 
comfort are not delusions that cheat us into a 
false peace. Its blessed provisions and promises 
for sinful and lost men are not frail rafts to which 
we trust ourselves at our imminent peril, and its 
doctrinal statements are worthy of unquestioning 
belief, especially that which blazes on its threshold 
and shines out from all its record of the life 



THE DIVINE C HEIST. 35 

and teachings of Jesus Christ. This fourth 
Gospel, with its all-sufficient vouchers of its 
heavenly origin, this fourth Gospel is preeminently 
the Gospel of the divinity of our Lord, and those 
who dispute or deny or dilute that doctrine are 
playing fast and loose with the sublirnest utter- 
ances which ever came from Him who sits on the 
throne to be the ruler and judge of men. 

But why? it is often asked, sometimes honestly, 
and sometimes petulantly — why lay so much stress 
upon this single doctrine? Why not be about 
more profitable business, and emphasize the prac- 
tical matter of the virtues and the moralities? 
Why so earnestly and persistently pursue and 
press and plead this matter of the divinity of 
Jesus Christ ? What great difference can it make 
whether we affirm or deny ? Ah, friends ! that is 
the infinite error into which men fall. No other 
truth in the holy Book is of such sovereign 
importance as this ; no other teaching has so 
much depending on our assent or our dissent. 
That unique life of Jesus Christ, our text says, is 
"the light of men," and it is "the light of men" 
just and only because it was unique, without a 
parallel from the beginning of the world until 
now. Make out that Jesus Christ was the best 



36 THE DIVINE CHBIST, 

and wisest of men, and stop there, and you have 
smitten with dire and total eclipse the only real 
sun that ever rose on this dark world. 

This doctrine of the divinity of our Lord is only 
a theological dogma, or an article in the creed ! 
You might just as truly say that yonder sun riding 
in mid-heaven is only an astronomical fact, or a 
record in the nautical almanac. It is a light, the 
light which lighteth every man who cometh into 
the world. There are potencies and adaptations 
in this doctrine of the God-man, which meet and 
supply great wants of our nature which otherwise 
must go unanswered. There is a hunger of soul 
which no other bread can feed. There is a 
spiritual poverty which must always remain, and 
always grow poorer, if this teaching of the Incar- 
nation be not true. We are and must forever 
remain in the deadness and darkness of sin, 
unless " for us men and for our salvation,'' God 
came down from heaven, was manifest in the flesh, 
"suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, 
and buried." Skeptics and scoffers know not what 
they do when they attempt to drag the Redeemer 
down to the level of a mere man, and assert that 
his teachings have no more authority than those of 
any other scholar or sage. In a recent notable 



THE DIVINE CUBIST. 37 

representative gathering of those who profess to 
be enlightened religious men, the chief speaker 
laid down the proposition, from which apparently 
no one dissented, "that the authority of our 
faith is found in the teachings of Jesus ; not that 
they were original with him, but that he himself, 
realizing their truth, impressed their truth upon 
all who heard him. His authority rested upon his 
perception of truth and his ability to make others 
perceive it. The same authority rests in all men 
who stand in the light, and who, seeing the truth 
themselves, are able to give light to others as to 
duty, faith, hope, love, and life. Thinkers, poets, 
scholars, and reformers are our authorities : such 
men as Channing, Dewey. Emerson, Martineau, 
and others being those who have stood and stand 
on the heights, revealing to all the light which has 
been revealed to them." 

I have no strictures to make upon those who 
advocate these views. To their own master they 
stand or fall. I desire to speak of the views 
themselves with due calmness and moderation, but 
it seems to me that men are engaged in an ill 
business, who are endeavoring to rob a lost world 
of its only Redeemer. There is not much gained 
by substituting star-gazing on the heights, and 



38 THE DIVINE CHBIST. 

such dim nebulae of truth as may be discovered, for 
simple faith in a divine Saviour, and the glory of 
God as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ. 
Emerson and Martineau and Channing are great 
names in certain departments of human thought, 
but in my want and sin they can teach me nothing 
and help me none, and I turn away from them to 
Him of whom it is written in Scripture, " Who, 
being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to 
be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, 
taking the form of a servant, being made in the like- 
ness of men ; and being found in fashion as a man, 
he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto 
death, yea, the death of the cross. Wherefore also 
God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the 
name which is above every name ; that in the 
name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things 
in heaven and things on earth and things of the 
world below, and that every tongue should con- 
fess that Jesus Christ is Lord." 

I say without any hesitation, and I weigh my 
words when I say it — I say that you and I know 
just as much as Channing and Martineau and 
Emerson, or any of the hierarchy of modern 
apostles, and they know just as little as we ; for 
apart from Scripture teaching no man knows 



THE DIVINE CHBIST. 39 

any thing about how a lost soul may be redeemed, 
or on what terms a sinner can be forgiven, or how 
a blessed immortality may be secured, or whether 
there is any immortality. The profoundest prob- 
lems with which we are called to wrestle are out- 
side the widest range of mere human thinking. 
A child might as sensibly undertake to survey and 
measure the infinities of space with the multipli- 
cation table for his calculus, as you and I to 
assume to unravel the great mysteries of the 
spiritual world with our speculations and philoso- 
phies. They are a mere fog and fume of words. 
We want knowledge, and we never know until 
we know Jesus Christ, true God and true man, 
" the light which lighteth every man who coineth 
into the world." I cannot find words strong 
enough to sufficiently emphasize the sovereign 
importance of this truth. 

I repeat that it is no theological dogma which I 
am urging ; it is a fact, the knowledge of which is 
the essential condition of real spiritual life and 
blessedness. " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ 
and thou shalt be saved," and, " There is none 
other name under heaven given among men, 
whereby we must be saved." Now all souls intel- 
ligent enough to understand their needs, and 



40 THE DIVINE CHRIST. 

humble enough to confess their helplessness, 
reach out after this truth and accept it with 
measureless gladness. How profoundly they sym- 
pathize with the words of one of England's scholars, 
whose fame is world-wide : " My heart demands 
the doctrine as much as my reason. I want to be 
sure that God cares for us ; that God is our 
Father ; that God has interfered, stooped, sacrificed 
himself for us. I do not merely want to love Christ, 
a Christ, some creation or emanation of God, 
whose will and character, for aught I know, may 
be different from God's. I want to love and honor 
the absolute God himself, and none other will 
satisfy me, and in the doctrine of Christ being co- 
equal and co-eternal, sent by, sacrificed by his 
Father, that he might do his Father's will, I find it, 
and no puzzling texts shall rob me of that rest for 
my heart. If the doctrine be not in the Bible, it 
ought to be, for the whole spiritual nature of man 
cries out for it." 

Charles Kingsley, referring to a gifted friend of 
his who rejected this truth, once said : " The more 
I see of him, the more I learn to love the true 
doctrines of the gospel, because I see more and 
more that only in faith and love to the Incarnate 
God our Saviour can the cleverest as well as the 



THE DIVINE CHRIST. 41 

simplest find the peace of God which passes under- 
standing." A great crowd of witnesses whom no 
man can number attest the truth of that saying. 
By righteous character attained and holy work done 
under the inspiration of that truth, by sharp and 
fiery death welcomed in the defence of that truth, 
by hopes surmounting the blankness and silence 
of the grave, plumed and winged by faith in that 
truth, they have recorded their conviction that 
that divine life is the light of men. But it is said 
that there are many who do not accept that teach- 
ing. True, u the light shineth in the darkness ; 
and the darkness apprehended it not." I turn to 
the letter which the apostle Paul wrote to the 
Corinthian church and I read: "And if our gos- 
pel is veiled, it is veiled in them that are perishing ; 
IB whom the God of this world hath blinded 
the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of 
the gospel of the glory of Christ should not 
dawn upon them/' 

This unfaith on the part of men was not unfore- 
seen by God. But notice what is said about it: 
"The light shineth in the darkness;" not the 
darkness of ignorance only, but the darkness of 
prejudice and self-will and pride and worldliness 
and enmity to God, and it is no easy thing for 



42 THE DIVINE CHRIST. 

even divine light to penetrate these dense walls 
and shuttered windows, and stream in upon the 
soul. Out in the open field at midday, how 
freely and full the golden rain of the sunshine 
falls, and the brown earth and ancient rocks and 
quivering leaves and dancing blades of grass are 
aflame with the splendor ; but in the dim cloister 
or the prison cell or the dingy cellar, how hard it 
is for even a stray beam of the light to find its 
way ! Men's characters and theories and pursuits 
are often such that they present impassable bar- 
riers to the truth. The scholar may have such 
confidence in the conclusions of his own thinking, 
that he turns his back on the teachings of revela- 
tion. An unbeliever may be so bitter in his hatred 
or so pronounced in his contempt for evangelical 
religion, that the cloud of his dark mood hides 
even the light of God. A man of affairs may be 
so busy with the things of the earth that he never 
looks up to see whether there is a heaven, and sun 
and stars blaze in the firmament above him with- 
out his ever seeing them. Nothing strange that 
men do not see the light of Christ, when they 
so screen themselves from the light. But notice 
another thing that is said : " The light shineth in 
the darkness," and it is the darkness that does not 



THE DIVINE CUBIST. 43 

apprehend it. It is not as some would have us 
believe ; it is not clear thought and sound reason 
and fair and plain interpretation of the New 
Testament in the simple interest of the truth, that 
fails to discover and accept the doctrine of a divine 
Saviour. It is the darkness that apprehends it 
not : the dark mind obscured with prejudice or 
opaque from false education ; the dark heart full of 
willfulness and self-love, and impatient of restraint; 
it is the darkness that does not see the light. 
Never a greater misnomer than to give the name 
rationalism to a system that has for its foundation- 
stone the rejection of the claims of Jesus Christ. 
It is all only and always irrationalism from first to 
last. Never a more glaring folly than for men to 
sing praises to " sweetness and light " who can 
find neither light nor sweetness in an incarnate 
God and a divine Redeemer. 

If any of you, friends, are refusing to believe in 
Jesus Christ as your adorable Lord, and are congrat- 
ulating yourselves that you occupy an advanced 
position, and are imagining that your unfaith is 
the result of more generous culture and a clearer 
outlook which emancipates you from an old super- 
stition, on the authority of God I say to you a 
thousand times Xo. Take the knowledge of 



44 THE DIVINE CHRIST. 

Jesus Christ out of this world of ours to-day and 
swift and utter darkness would follow. Govern- 
ments founded in justice would crumble ; the se- 
curities of civil order would vanish ; the safeguards 
of business would be destroyed ; virtue and mor- 
ality would be expunged from the vocabulary; 
the sanctity of womanhood would be trampled in 
the mire ; the worship of God would become the 
orgies of the brothel, and the bacchanal and satur- 
nalian days of the ancient paganism would come 
back at once with their lurid light and their blast- 
ing fires. It is a wonder beyond measure that men 
who know any thing of history, or of the condition 
of the heathen world to-day, should dare unthread 
one least filament from the outmost fringe of the 
kingly robes of Jesus Christ. If from the begin- 
ning until now there has been any transforming, 
transfiguring power in the world, it is the knowl- 
edge of Jesus Christ. If there have been any 
hands outstretched in help and healing over our 
poor bleeding humanity, they are the hands of 
Jesus Christ. If there have been any ethical sys- 
tems that have had in them the elements of right- 
eousness and permanency and force, they came 
from the teachings of Jesus Christ. If over the 
graves where our beloved are buried, and where we 



THE DIVINE CHRIST. 45 

ourselves are so soon to lie, any assured hopes 
have been lighted, whose flame the chill winds of 
death can not extinguish, and whose radiance 
streaming inward from the vestibule of the 
sepulcher illumines the infinite home beyond, 
where the good and true forever live and love, 
those hopes were kindled by the breath of the 
risen Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 

Is it knowledge not to know him just as he is, 
and all that he is ? Is it evidence that we are ad- 
vancing in clear thought because in our estimate 
of him he dwindles from the proportions of a 
God to the shrunken dimensions of a man ? Have 
we made progress of which we have reason to be 
proud because we have come to the conclusion 
that his words are only human words, and he him- 
self one of a company of scholars and poets up on 
the heights, finding out what he believes, so that 
he may be able to tell us ? No honest man in his 
thoughtful hours can believe it. If this great 
light out of heaven has been kindled in the dark- 
ness of our lost world and we do not see it, it is 
not ours to boast, but to weep and pray for for- 
giveness and help for our blindness. The light is 
and shines, the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ ; it is only darkness that apprehends it not. 



46 THE DIVINE C HEIST. 

There is still another aspect of this matter to 
be noted. As we read on in the text we find it 
written, " As many as received him, to them gave 
he the right to become children of God, even to 
them that believe on his name." Our estimate of 
Jesus Christ, therefore, our attitude of mind and 
heart towards him, has a vital connection with 
our spiritual condition and prospects. It is an 
easy thing to call ourselves children of God ; it is 
another thing to prove our right to the title. The 
apostle, in his letter to the Galatian church, writes : 
" For ye are all the children of God, by faith in 
Christ Jesus ; " and again he writes " When the 
fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his 
Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to 
redeem them that were under the law, that we 
might receive the adoption of sons." If the 
New Testament is to be believed, the question 
whether we are children of God can not be an- 
swered in the affirmative simply because we 
possess certain excellences of character. 

There are honest men in the world, and upright 
men and generous men, who make no claim that 
they are religious men. To be correct in one's 
habits and blameless in one's conduct is a most 
estimable thing, but being merely that does not 



THE DIVINE CHRIST. 47 

make me a child of God. The right to call 
myself that is not a natural but an acquired right, 
a right given to men on certain conditions ; and 
who has either the right or the power to determine 
those conditions, save He by whose sovereign 
grace and favor alone it is that any are admitted 
into the family of God? We need to keep in 
mind the wide difference there is between being 
virtuous and being accepted as a child of the 
Highest. One is wholly dependent upon our per- 
sonal conduct, the other depends upon the consent 
of God ; and yet these two things are sadly confused 
in the popular thought. Men who utterly reject 
Jesus Christ as their Redeemer and Lord insist 
upon being called Christians because they practice 
the ethics of Christianity. But no excellency of 
behavior constitutes a claim upon God, to make 
us his children. We reach that honor and privilege 
on his own terms, or not at all. If we desire to 
come into the blessed experience and rights of real 
and acknowledged sonship, there is only one way 
to accomplish it. There on the pages of divine 
revelation flames the invariable and unalterable 
condition : " As many as receive Jesus Christ, to 
them gives he the right to become the children 
of God, even to them that believe on his name." 



48 THE DIVINE CHBIST. 

But you say this is bigotry. It is the bigotry 
of holy Scripture. But you say this is a narrow 
theory. It is a theory for whose narrowness God 
is responsible. But you say it is unfair. Then it 
is your Maker and Judge who is not just, and you 
must carry your appeal to his bar. But you say 
it is a conceited assumption of superiority on the 
part of the Church. It is a fact announced by 
those divine lips that speak nothing but truth. 
But you say we will have nothing to do with your 
doctrine. It is not with us but with God that 
you part company. Criticism, satire, reproach, dis- 
sent, bluster, bravado, none of these things make 
any impression upon the established laws of the 
moral universe. Railing against gravitation will 
not prevent a building that is out of plumb from 
falling. Storming against the conditions of divine 
grace will not put into place a soul that is out of 
place. If we are truly children of God, it is un- 
alterably and everlastingly certain that " we are 
the children of God, through faith in Jesus 
Christ." 

What more present and pressing duty then, 
friends, rests upon us than our obligation to 
believe in our hearts and confess with our lips 
that in Jesus Christ we have a divine Redeemer 



THE DIVINE CHRIST. 49 

and Lord, and, putting aside old prejudice and 
pride of opinion and fictions of speculation and 
false human creeds, to find the warrant of our 
reasonable faith in those simple words, " Thus 
saith the Lord " ? 

Is it a stern and j'03'less truth which we are 
asked to embrace? Does it afflict us to believe 
that Jesus of Xazareth, who was hungry and cold 
and homeless, who was despised and abused and 
suffered, just as it often happens to us, who 
knew all the bitterness that human life can ever 
know, — does it afflict us to believe that he was 
u God manifest in the flesh," and so the infinite 
sympathy of common experience exists between us 
and God, who knows how to bear our grief and 
carry our sorrows, having been tried in all points 
as we are ? Does it pain us to think that the 
words which Jesus spoke came from the lips of a 
divine speaker, and so are of unquestioned author- 
ity? Is it a hardship to believe that by simple 
heart-trust in that Christ we are given the 
right to call ourselves the children of God, and to 
know that we are heirs to the richness of divine 
grace now and the wonders of divine glory here- 
after ? 

Certainly we have no cause to complain of a 
revelation like that, so surprising, so sufficient, so 



50 THE DIVINE CHBIST. 

satisfying. Rather let us thank God that he has 
kindled such a light in the darkness, and opened 
our hearts to let its brightness stream in upon us. 
So life's troubled sea shall lie like the ocean in a 
midsummer noon, with every crest and surge 
transfigured with radiance from the open heavens, 
and when He who once walked a man among 
men " shall appear a second time without sin unto 
salvation," our lips that have learned the song 
by earthly experience of the truth shall join the 
high acclaim that rolls forever about his throne, 
and hail him " King of kings, and Lord of Lords." 



III. 

€^c ContegteD Mill. 



III. 

THE CONTESTED WILL. 

"The New Testament." —Hebrews 9: 15. 

ri^HE attention and interest of the whole com- 
-*- munity has been greatly excited during 
the last ten days by the trial in our courts of 
law of a contested will case. Eminent counsel 
from far and near were retained by both appellant 
and appellee. Witnesses from the ordinary walks 
of life and from the learned professions were 
summoned by either side to give out of their 
knowledge or experience evidence bearing upon 
the matter at issue. The representatives of the 
press carefully watched and noted down the 
proceedings, and day by day the metropolitan 
journals announced the progress of the trial to 
hundreds of thousands in all parts of the land. 
The interest of our own community evidenced 
itself in the crowds that pressed to get within 
hearing distance of counsel and witnesses, over- 
flowing all the ordinary limits assigned by the 
decorum of the court-room to the public, taxing 

53 



54 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

to the utmost the complaisant good nature of 
the officers of the law and the members of the 
bar. And yet of all the hundreds who day 
after day assembled within those walls, not more 
than five or six individuals at the most had any 
immediate personal interest in the issue of the 
cause. That bit of paper about which such a 
controversy was waging was nothing to them. 
No man or woman of them all would be a cent 
richer or poorer whichever way the case went. 
It was the trial and its accessories that excited 
their interest. 

Watching as I had opportunity the progress 
of the cause from day to day, and sharing in 
the eagerness which others felt in regard to it, 
it occurred to me to speak to you this morning 
of another will case now in process of trial before 
the Supreme Court of human opinion; a case 
in whose issue each man has a most pressing 
personal concern, and yet a case in which each 
man assumes to be a juror ; a case in which each 
man is counsel on both sides, his sinfulness 
and deep spiritual need pleading that the will 
should stand, his selfishness and evil heart argu- 
ing that it should be set aside; a case famous 
on account of its antiquity, it having been on 



THE CONTESTED WILL. 55 

trial for centuries; a ease important because of 
the vast estates in question ; a case impressive 
because he who sits as judge of the proceedings, 
and to whose ruling no exceptions can be taken, 
is God the Judge of all ; and yet a case in 
which so far as it relates to their immediate 
personal welfare, the great majority of men feel 
the least possible interest. In the contrariety of 
its aspects, in its self-contradictions, in the strange 
endeavor of the heirs at law to argue themselves 
out of their own property, in the insane and 
frantic desire of the legatees to break the will, 
and at the same time their seeming indifference 
to the whole matter of the will, the case is 
without a parallel in the records of jurisprudence. 
The will in question purports to be the " Will 
and Testament of Jesus Christ." I do not pro- 
pose to read it, on account of its length, and it 
is not necessary, as an attested copy of it is in 
the hands of every member of this congregation, 
all of whom ought to be familiar with it. It is 
summarily contained in the fourteenth, fifteenth, 
and sixteenth chapters of the Gospel of John. 
It begins with the comforting words, "Let not 
your hearts be troubled," and it ends with the 
comforting assurance, " Be of good cheer, I 



56 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

have overcome the world." In a larger and yet 
just sense the whole of the Four Gospels are 
a part of this will, for they are made up of the 
spoken declarations of Christ in regard to it, 
and the record of significant actions that go 
to show his cherished purpose in the matter. 
So also the writings of the apostles are to be 
added to the body of the document, for they 
are the explanations of the personal friends of 
Christ who knew his whole mind in the matter. 
And so not without reason we commonl}^ style 
this whole collection of papers as the " New 
Testament" of Jer>us Christ. 

There are some peculiarities about this will 
that make it more notable than any other that 
was ever written. 

In the first place, it is a wonderfully large 
estate of which it professes to dispose. No such 
inventory of property was ever found in any 
uther will presented for probate. We have in 
this country only a few men who are possessed 
of what are called large fortunes, and we over- 
estimate their property. Look at the estates of 
our few millionaires, taking them at their own 
estimate. Their property consists in part of real 
estate, which fluctuates in value continually ; that 



THE CONTESTED WILL. 57 

which is worth a great deal now may be worth 
little or nothing by-and-by. Men talk about the 
permanency of judicious investments in real es- 
tate, and yet all history shows that land which 
you must flow with gold in order to buy to-day, 
a century hence may possibly be bought for a 
song. Eligible building lots in Carthage and 
Nineveh and Babylon once had their value per 
foot quoted at prices that would frighten a 
Wall Street broker, but to-day they would not 
bring a penny an acre. 

Another part of the millionaire's property con- 
sists of bonds and stock certificates, but that 
which secures to-day ten, twenty, forty per 
cent, dividends, fifty years from now may be 
so much waste-paper. Another part of the prop- 
erty, perhaps, consists of things that seem more 
substantial : houses, ships, plate. But some Chi- 
cago fire that eats up the building and bankrupts 
the insurance company dissipates in smoke the 
value of the house, and the cyclone sinks ships 
and cargo, and the burglar makes way with plate. 
Nothing that we call property has permanent 
value. There are men by thousands in New 
York who ten years ago rolled in luxury, who 
to-day are thankful to earn their bread. It is 



58 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

entirely different with the estate to dispose of 
which this will is drawn. " Durable riches " 
this is called, treasure which neither moth nor 
rust can corrupt, nor thieves steal. Fire can not 
burn it ; seas can not sink it ; time instead of 
depreciating, only and always increases, its value. 

Furthermore, it is property which invariably 
ennobles the man who possesses it. Those who 
inherit under this will become " kings and priests 
unto God, and reign with him for ever and ever." 
They live in a style becoming their rank, "for 
God hath prepared for them a city," and that 
city, as we are told in the will, is one of such 
magnificence that, compared with it, the most 
splendid cities of the world are mere collec- 
tions of mud-huts ; the inhabitants wear kings' 
garments and eat angels' food. 

And what adds immensely to the value of the 
property, it is permanent. A man rich under 
the provisions of this will is even richer the 
other side of the grave than he is this. To him 
death is only a key with which he unlocks vaster 
treasure houses. Forever and forever his wealth 
is to go on increasing, with never a break or 
a drawback to the constant gain. Wonderful 
estate ! The most absolute sovereign has no such 
property at his disposal. 



THE CONTESTED WILL. 59 

Another peculiarity of this will is that any 
body who pleases may have his name added to 
the list of heirs. There are no questions asked 
as to his nationality or his family connections, 
or as to his being already rich, or whether he has 
ever rendered any service to the Testator. The 
fact that he desires to be one of the heirs is 
enough. Whosoever will, let him come and take. 
Still more, every body is invited to become an 
heir. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Because 
thou sayest, I am rich, and increased in goods, 
and have need of nothing, I counsel thee to re- 
ceive of me gold tried in the fire. Ho, every one 
that thirsteth, come ye. And the Spirit and the 
bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, 
Come. Hearken unto me and eat ye that which 
is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness ; 
Come, for all things are ready. And I will be a 
Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and 
daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. And if 
children then heirs, heirs of God to an inherit- 
ance incorruptible and underiled. And eacli one 
may have just as much of the property as he 
pleases. Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father 
in my name, it shall be done unto you. And yet 



60 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

however much any one receives, it does not in 
the least reduce the portion of the rest. In my 
Father's house are many mansions : if it were not 
so, I would have told you. In my Father's house 
there is bread enough and to spare, Go out into 
the highways and hedges and compel them to 
come in, and yet there is room. There need be 
no wrangling about such a will as this, no scram- 
bling or "jealous heirs afraid that some one will 
get more than his portion, no attempt of any to 
wrest from others their allotment under the 
provisions of the will. There is property enough 
for each one to have all that he desires, and still 
leave enough to satisfy all the rest. 

This is such a strange will that we naturally 
ask how it came to be made? Was it a freak 
of insanity? Was any undue influence brought 
to bear upon the Testator and the will thus 
vitiated? The very first words of the will 
answer these questions, and give the reasons 
why it was made as it was. " God so loved the 
world;" that was the origin and the inspiration 
of it. God's pity for a needy, dying race moved 
God's heart. We sometimes see men whose im- 
pulses move them in somewhat the same direc- 
tion. Girard founds a college, and Peabody 



THE CONTESTED WILL. 61 

builds tenement houses, and others endow hospi- 
tals and houses of refuge for the good of people 
they never expect to see. This wonderful will 
of Christ came out of the wonderful heart of 
Christ. It is a love testament. No meaner mo- 
tive went to its making. It was not to leave 
behind him the reputation of having been won- 
derfully benevolent, so that his fame as a bene- 
factor would be handed down from age to age, 
that Christ wrote this will. There have been 
those who from that motive have made a very 
beneficent disposition of their property. Christ 
did not belong to that class. Neither was it 
done in the way of a grateful return to friends 
for their many kindnesses, though that is a very 
proper and considerate motive. Men of fortune 
when they make their wills do well to remember 
those who have been affectionate toward them, 
bearing with their weaknesses, advising them 
in their perplexities, helping them in their 
troubles. But it was not remembrance and re- 
gard for his friends that actuated Christ. No ! 
God commendeth his love toward us in that 
while we were yet sinners, and so enemies, this 
will was drawn up in our favor. 

11 Oh, matchless kindness ! and He shows 
This matchless kindness to his foes." 



62 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

This is something like love ; love despised, re- 
jected, spit upon, accused, buffeted, trampled 
under foot, and yet all the time busy in trying 
to benefit its enemies; love that looked down 
into the lowest hell of transgression and said, 
"I came not to call the righteous but sinners;" 
love that smiled through the midnight of Cal- 
vary's rage, and instead of hurling thunderbolts 
upon mocking scribes and hooting rabble and 
savage soldiers, just prayed back to heaven, 
"Father, forgive these also." When I want to 
know what love is, I will just read over this 
will that Christ made, and remember in whose 
favor he made it, and under what circumstances, 
and so get some idea of what love can do. 

"Oh, for this love let rocks and hills 
Their lasting silence break, 
And all harmonious human tongues 
Their Saviour's praises speak." 

Certain formalities are used in drawing up 
a will. It must be expressed in proper phrase. 
It must be acknowledged as one's free will and 
testament. It must be signed and sealed in the 
presence of witnesses, who affix their own 
signatures. This is imperative in the eye of 
the law, however small the property may be. 



THE CONTESTED WILL. 63 

You may be very sure all proper formalities 
were observed in drawing up the mightiest will 
ever made in the universe. Men criticize it 
sometimes as lacking unity. It is a mere series 
of memoranda, they say, fragments and snatches 
of history and conversation, not a proper docu- 
ment at all. Amazing mistake ! All the lawyers 
of the world would have failed to draw it up 
so that it would have been as binding as it is 
now. The great problem of spiritual jurispru- 
dence has always been how God could be just 
and yet justify a sinner, a problem never solved 
except under the provisions of this will. 

The proper formalities not observed? What 
formalities were ever so august? This will was 
written in the Testator's blood. No ink was 
pure enough or permanent enough. The pen 
with which Lincoln wrote the Emancipation 
Proclamation that gave to millions their inherit- 
ance of freedom was only a common pen, but 
the pen that wrote this will and testament of 
Jesus Christ was a Roman spear, its point thrust 
into the Saviour's side to find ink for the writing. 

The will was witnessed. Two worlds were 
summoned to hear the Testator cry, " It is 
finished," and see him affix the signature of his 



64 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

death. The living came from their homes and 
the dead rose up out of their graves to witness 
the signing. The seal was affixed, the seal whose 
device is a blood-stained cross and an empty 
sepulcher. And over against that seal two worlds 
wrote their autograph : this world with the shak- 
ing hand of the earthquake ; that world with the 
blazing penmanship of the lightning. And that 
will God the Holy Ghost, the appointed executor, 
comes and presents to men. Certainly, though 
not written out in law phrase, no other document 
was ever set forth in such august manner and 
with such solemnities of form. No other ever 
had such claims to the reverence and the ready 
acceptance of men. 

And yet it is a contested will. The single con- 
dition on which men inherit under it is objection- 
able to many, and to get rid of that they cry out 
against the will itself with all its gracious provi- 
sions. The Testator has written down that the 
favor of God and eternal life can only be obtained 
through him. If we have them we must have them 
as a gift from him. We do not deserve them ; we 
can not earn them. If our sins are ever forgiven 
they must be forgiven through Christ's blood. If 
we ever reach heaven it must be by the road which 



THE CONTESTED WILL. 65 

he opened with his cross. No hand but his pierced 
hand can put into our hands the title-deeds of an 
estate on high ; and so we are told that we must 
abate our pride and crush down our self-conceit, 
and come to him, and through faith in him learn 
to say, " Our Father," and so be adopted as sons 
and daughters into God's family, claiming every 
thing on the ground of the will. And men not 
liking to do that try to break the will and have it 
set aside and the property divided on some other 
terms, and so from the beginning until now the 
case has always been on trial in the court of 
human opinion. 

Men ask that this will be set aside, in the first 
place, on the ground that it is not a genuine will. 
In our day especially it is argued that the Bible 
is in no special sense the Word of God. It has 
great thoughts in it and teaches us good morality, 
but it is not infallible. It is not binding upon 
us. We are not compelled to accept its state- 
ments. You hear plenty of that sort of talk. 
This book, so far as it claims to be divine, is a 
fraud. Infidel philosophers labor to disprove it. 
Liberal Christianity tries to sponge out all the 
1)1 ood letters of redemption. The advanced thought 
of the age ridicules it. Some of you, I am afraid, 



66 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

do not believe it. It is laughed at as an exploded 
falsehood. Men drag it into the courts of criti- 
cism, and argue that God could n't have written it; 
that he would n't say such a thing as this, and it is 
absurd to suppose that he has any such purpose as 
that clause indicates. Some people call it a collec- 
tion of traditions, others a bundle of myths, others 
an Oriental poem, others a system of theology. 
You may call it any thing you please, so long as 
you admit that it is not the Word of God. 
What infinite pains men take in this matter! The 
chemist's crucible, and geologist's hammer, and 
naturalist's microscope, and anatomist's scalpel, 
and antiquarian's spade, and astronomer's telescope 
are all busy trying to prove that the will is not 
genuine. A strange infatuation ! The heirs to a 
boundless estate hard at work to prove that the 
document which secures them in possession is a 
miserable forgery, and they take so little by their 
motion ! 

That devil's work has been going on for 
eighteen hundred years, and there are to-day 
more Bibles in the world, and more people that 
believe it to be the Word of God, and more souls 
that come into their inheritance under its provi- 
sions, than there ever were before. It can not be 



THE COXTESTED WILL. 67 

laughed down, nor argued down, nor torn in 
pieces, nor wiped out. It is God's Word, written 
first of all on his own heart and then copied for us. 
He meant it to stand, and stand it will. Heaven 
and earth may pass away, but not one jot or tittle 
of this blessed will and testament can ever fail. 

Men endeavor to break this will and have it set 
aside on the ground that there is another and 
better attested will in existence. From reason 
and nature it is said we can learn all that we need 
to know about God and duty and destiny. At any 
rate, the will of God as expressed in nature and 
reason seems to indicate that men are sure of the 
divine favor and eternal life without any condi- 
tions ; the blessings of providence fall on all alike. 
Rain, sunshine, health, prosperity, do not seem to 
depend upon a man's creed ; the infidel and Chris- 
tian share alike in the constant flood of bounty, and 
so, it is argued, it will be always and in every 
thing. The God who gives will certainly for- 
give if forgiveness is necessary; the God who 
furnishes every man with this fair heritage of 
earth will furnish every man with the fairer 
heritage of heaven. Our own reason teaches us 
that as we read nature, and that is enough. Is 
it enough ? It might be if we were not sinners. 
It was enough once. Before Adam sinned lie 



68 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

needed no Bible to tell him the way of salva- 
tion. His constant, unbarred communion with 
God was his heaven. But since man sinned has 
nature and reason been enough to account for 
the altar fires that blaze in one unbroken line 
of flame through all the centuries of history ? Ac- 
count for that wailing cry that has gone up from 
every generation, M What must we do to be 
saved?'' a cry at which nature has shrunk into 
dumbness, unable to answer? Account for the 
dread of death which haunts men like the night- 
mare? Account for those questions and fears in 
your own hearts which neither summer suns nor 
winter snows, nor oceans nor mountains nor 
forests, seem to have power to answer or still ? 

No, the old will, if will you can call it. was not 
sufficient. Men did not know, could not find out 
certainly, how God felt, what he meant to do : and 
so another testament was made, this New Testa- 
ment of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the 
latest will is the one that holds. If in any thing it 
conflicts with what has gone before, it sets it aside ; 
that is law in God's jurisprudence as well as man's, 
and this New Testament is the final one. It is 
written in the body of the will, " If any man shall 
add to these sayings, God shall add to him the 



THE CONTESTED WILL. 69 

plagues that are written herein, and if any man 
shall take away from these sayings, God shall take 
away his part out of the tree of life and out of 
the holy city/' This is not waste-paper, this New 
Testament, made void by another will. This is 
the last Will and Testament of Jesus Christ, 
embodying all the promise of the former and 
adding to it. Men must be blind who prefer the 
uncertainty without it to the assurance they have 
under it. Blind or not it matters not, the will is 
in force. Without it you and I can claim nothing ; 
under it all things are ours. 

But men endeavor to break this will on another 
ground, its alleged unfairness. It is said that its 
conditions are unfair, its rewards and punishments 
disproportionate to the matters on which they 
depend. Is there any unfairness ? Look at it as 
a matter of law. The learned judge the other day 
stated in his charge that " the right to dispose of 
one's own by will is most thoroughly established 
by the laws. It is a right growing out of property. 
The absolute control over the disposition of prop- 
erty is a right which belongs to every man of 
sound mind. In the exercise of it the testator 
may consult his caprices, his likes or dislikes. He 
may disinherit his children and kindred ; he may 



70 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

dispose of his property to promote charity at the 
ends of the earth." Shall man have that unques- 
tioned right and God not have it? He himself 
asks the question, " May I not do what I will with 
mine own ? " Forgiveness is his ; shall we ques- 
tion bis fairness if he makes conditions of forgive- 
ness ? Heaven is his ; shall we question his fair- 
ness if he prescribes the terms on which it may 
become ours? Let it be 'emembered that we 
have no shadow of a claim. He might send us all 
orphaned and homeless into eternity and still the 
cry would go up day and night before his throne, 
"Just and true are thy ways, thou King of 
saints." 

Men talk as though they had a right to demand 
of God the things which they receive only through 
his infinite mercy. No ; the only unfairness is one 
that makes in our favor. It is unfair that we 
should go up from these weak, sinful lives of ours 
and be received to the loving embrace of our 
Father, and have the best robes of heaven put upon 
us; and yet — oh, wonder of grace! — men may 
do that, are doing it every day, under this will. 
Blessed unfairness of God, who casts our sins 
behind his back and receives us graciously and 
loves us freely ! Wonderful unfairness, so more 



THE CONTESTED WILL. 71 

than fair to us that it will be our song and joy- 
forever ! Thief on the cross, what do you think 
about it? and denying Peter, and blaspheming 
Saul, and redeemed sinners out of every age and 
land that have entered into possession through the 
unfairness of God ? And as I turn my ear upward 
to listen for the answer, I hear dropping down 
through the criticisms and reproaches of a sinful 
world, the response of the ransomed hosts : " Hal- 
lelujah, hallelujah, thou art worthy, for thou hast 
redeemed us with thy blood and made us kings and 
priests unto God." And though men complain, the 
everlasting response sings on, stately and sweet, 
and every accusation of earth is answered by the 
hallelujah of heaven ; and with such witnesses and 
such evidence in its favor, the will can not be 
broken. There is not power enough in earth or 
hell to set it aside. The estate of those who have 
entered into glory can not be wrested from them. 
None shall pluck them out of the Father's hand. 
Your future and mine, friends, depends upon 
our acceptance or rejection of that will. We are 
not made heirs without our consent. We must 
acknowledge the will and comply with its condi- 
tions or we can not inherit under it. It is not, 
as some would have us believe, a matter of indif- 



72 THE CONTESTED WILL. 

ference how we stand affected towards this grace 
of God in Jesus Christ. It is not a question of 
creed. It is not a question of theology. It is 
a question of inheritance. Beggared to all the 
eternities, or rich and blessed forever, which shall 
we be ? It depends upon whether we accept or 
reject the will. In heaven or hell, where shall 
our future estates be ? It depends upon whether 
we accept or reject the Avill. Agree to it and put 
ourselves under its provisions, and we secure glory 
and honor and immortality ; reject it or pay no 
attention to it, and when death comes we shall be 
stripped of the last dollar of our money and the 
last rag of our possessions, and having spent all 
how shall we face the mighty famine of eternal 
want ? Dear friends, why should we contest this 
last Will and Testament of Jesus Christ ? It was 
made in our favor. Why should we not put in 
our claims as heirs under it and enter into our 
great estates ? 

The day is coming when this contest will be 
ended. Pursued from court to court of human 
opinion through so many centuries, the case will 
be on trial for the last time. The accessories of the 
trial will be worthy of the dignity of the cause. 
The court will assemble in the mighty amphitheater 



THE COXTESTED WILL. 73 

whose walls and roof are the heavens on fire 
and the elements melting with fervent heat. The 
great white throne will be built for the seat of 
the Judge ; the Ancient of days will be ushered to 
the bench by an innumerable company of angels, 
their staves of office the all-conquering banners 
of God ; the trumpet of the archangel will be the 
crier's voice proclaiming the court open. All 
nations will be assembled not as spectators but as 
parties to the case. The will will be produced, 
its handwriting of blood legible to every eye, the 
signatures of Testator and witnesses burning with 
a glory beyond the brightness of the sun. No 
cunning counsel will stand before the bar trying 
to make the wrong seem right. The right will 
need no counsel. The will itself will be its own 
argument. The case will be given to no jury. It 
is in the hands of the Supreme Court of the 
universe for decision. And it will be decided, 
and there its enemies who would not acknowledge 
the will shall go away into everlasting punish- 
ment and its friends and heirs into life eternal. 



IV. 



C^e £a>ott0 of d^oD, 



IV. 



THE SONS OF GOD. 

"Beloved, now are ive the sons of God, and it doth not yet ap- 
pear what ice shall be : but we know that, when he shall appear, 
ice shall be like him ; for we shall see him as he is.*' — 1 John 3 : 2. 

TT is very satisfactory to remember who wrote 
-*- these words, and how safe it is to believe them. 
They relate to an important matter, and one in 
which we all are, or ought to be, interested. 
What is religion? what can it do for a man? 
and is it worth the having ? are questions which 
the world is always asking and answering in a 
variety of ways. The most opposite opinions are 
held on the subject. Quite a large class in the 
community consider religion a mere superstition, 
the folly of weak minds, against whose essential 
doctrines the laws of nature utter an emphatic 
protest. Modern materialism dismisses the spirit- 
ual and the supernatural with a sneer, and counts 
the time spent in the study and teaching of Scrip- 
ture truth as wasted. Men of another cast of 
mind regard religion as a code of laws for the 



78 THE SONS OF GOD. 

regulation of conduct, its truths not necessarily 
a revelation, but a set of principles slowly learned 
and always enlarging, — the conclusions of experi- 
ence rather than a direct word of God, — its sole 
va'ue the mistakes from which it saves us and the 
right ways of living into which it leads us; a 
rigid, hard, but healthy statute system of morality, 
but utterly without any warm pulse of personal 
divine life in it that makes it attractive. You 
find others, also, with whom it is a mere fanati- 
cism, a vapory, unsubstantial sentimentalism, 
which excites in them a certain exhilaration of 
feeling, but which seems to have very little grip 
and power on practical life. They spend so much 
time and exhaust so much energy in trying to 
feel good that there is hardly any left for being 
good. 

Besides these there is a numerous class of think- 
ers and believers to whom religion is something 
more and something very different ; who formu- 
late their convictions in churches and Christian 
institutions ; who find in religion a life as well as 
a law ; who speak of peculiarly precious assurances 
and experiences which they enjoy; to whom 
Christ's words are both a comfort and a con- 
straint, and who insist that right believing is the 



THE SOXS OF GOD. 79 

secret of right living. How are we to decide 
between these different theories ? Whether re- 
ligion is worth our having depends upon what 
religion is. A good definition would be a won- 
derful help. If we can have the whole thing 
clearly outlined before us, we shall be in a condi- 
tion to make up our minds as to what we each 
one of us ought to be and do in the matter. 

Now the apostle John was peculiarly qualified 
to speak with authority on the subject. He was 
naturally many sided, a combination of man's 
strength and woman's tenderness, quick to feel and 
as quick to weigh and measure the substance and 
quality of his feeling. He had special oppor- 
tunities. The chosen, intimate, and constant com- 
panion of our Lord in his earthly ministry, he 
shared as no other did in the secrets of the Mes- 
siahship. He saw the sorrows of Gethsemane and 
the glories of the transfiguration, the midnight 
of the cross and the sunburst of the resurrection. 
If any body is able to tell us what the real heart 
and life of religion is it is this apostle. And that 
is just what he undertakes to do in these words of 
the text. 

Mark also that he does not attempt a philo- 
sophical definition, lie just opens his heart to 



80 THE SONS OF GOD. 

us and tells us what he has found religion to be, 
and what it has wrought in him, and what it is 
able to work in any man. His fervid speech sets 
forth what religion is or nvdj be to the whole 
world. Let us sit down with him a little while 
and hear what he has to say to us. 

I. And, to begin with, he announces a great 
fact. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." 
That is the status of every truly religious man. 
The characterization is evidently not a mere rhe- 
torical flourish. I turn back one verse in the 
chapter and read: "Behold, what manner of love 
the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should 
be called the sons of God, and so we are." There 
is something very real about all this. A truly 
religious man is differently situated from other 
men. His relations to this world and the world 
to come and the God of both worlds is peculiar 
and significant. Somehow, by the working of 
spiritual powers unseen and immeasurable, he has 
been made a member of the great and blessed 
family in whose interest all things are ordered. 
For him the stars shine, and the winds sing, and 
the tides heave, and the flowers spice the air with 
sweetness ; and the course of human history keeps 
on its majestic way, and earth is attentive and 



THE SOXS OF GOD. 81 

heaven busy. There is no shift in the vast uni- 
verse of God that is not directly or indirectly 
for his good. He stands at the focus towards 
which all the rays of blessing converge. " Very 
nary all this," perhaps you say; very real, 
nevertheless. Tell me, if you can, how to state 
the exalted condition of a religious man in terms 
more positive and exhaustive than those which 
Scripture itself uses : " For all things are yours ; 

f»»r ve are Christ's and Christ is God's." 

«/ 

And the blessed fact is that every religious man 
knows that he stands just there and so. The 
truth is not written on his forehead, the glory of 
it does not always transfigure him so that other 
people see it, but he has the inward evidence. 
"The Spirit himself beareth witness with our 
spirit that we are the children of God." Men 
are not left in ignorance of the wonderful change 
that has been wrought in them and for them. In 
weak hours, when heart and strength fail them, 
there is a sudden uplift and reinforcement as they 
remember that " God is the strength of their heart 
and their portion for ever." In solitary hours 
there is a sense of companionship as the old voice 
out of Galilee whispers in their ears, " Lo, I am 
with you alway." In prayer there come moments 



82 THE SONS OF GOD. 

of disclosure when every vail is withdrawn and 
the child feels that he is talking with his Father. 
You have here the secret of religious contentment 
which the world is always at a loss to discover. 
There are multitudes who can not see what there 
is enjoyable in a Christian life. Apparently it has 
many constraints and few privileges. Its assem- 
blies for worship, its devotions, its hymns, its 
various forms of effort, all seem to lack the sparkle 
which gives zest and edge to pleasure. The con- 
sciousness of sonship underneath explains it all. 
"I must be," and am glad to be, "about my 
Father's business," is the measure to which the 
statelier courses of life are set. There is nothing 
that gives satisfaction like a great assurance at 
the center of our being. 

The Hall of the Stalactites in the Mammoth 
Cave looks shadowy and grim by the light of the 
lamps which other men carry, but kindle your own 
torch and raise it above your head, and you find 
yourself the center of a rain of splendors that 
stream from crystal and spar. Religious life 
looked at from outside seems tame and unsatis- 
factory, but Christian experience carries its own 
lamp, this consciousness of sonship, and in the 
light of that what seems tame and unattractive to 



THE SONS OF GOD. 83 

the world is transfigured by the great and blessed 
certainty. 

And is it not easy to see what dignity and worth 
this consciousness must inevitably give to life? 
There is a vast deal in our happenings and sur- 
roundings to dispirit us. We are low down in 
the world, perhaps. People about us make little 
account of us. To the most of them it would 
not matter a farthing whether we lived or died. 
Worse still, we are not true to our better selves. 
We do not realize our ideals. We go stumbling 
along, our lives full of sins and blunders, never 
just what we want to be and mean to be, some- 
times losing by a single misstep what we have 
gained by months of effort ; that is the average 
life, is it not ? But supposing a man knows that 
in spite of it all he is a son of Grod ! Weakness, 
defilement, dust, can not cover up that fact. What 
courage it gives to enterprise ! How the bracing 
north wind of that thought blows away the fogs and 
clouds of dispiritment that settle upon the soul ! 
King Alfred, a fugitive and dishonored, watches 
the fire and turns the spit in the cottage in the 
Highlands, feeding his heart with the thought 
that, notwithstanding his poor surroundings, lie 
is the king; and plain John and Mary, and all the 



84 THE SONS OF GOD. 

great brotherhood and sisterhood of believers now, 
stay themselves up with the assurance that they 
are of the royal house of heaven, in exile now, 
perhaps from their own fault, but not disowned 
or discrowned. This mighty confidence in them 
and a great hope before them, can you not see 
how such an assurance as that gives wonderful 
inspiritment and vigor to life? 

" Ye are the salt of the earth," Christ said to 
his disciples. It is a fact, though not always 
recognized, that Christian men and women keep 
up the courage of the world. If they were to 
lose heart, all heart would be lost ; and their sup- 
port, which nothing can shake, is the thought of 
whose and what they are ; and their conviction, 
that he is able to keep them and theirs secure, in 
spite of all the bewilderment and obscurity of 
present experience. If religion had nothing better 
and nothing else to give us than this conscious- 
ness, that of itself would be worth more than any 
thing which the world has to offer. 

II. But the apostle further notes that what- 
ever religion may be to us and do for us now, it is 
only the hint of what is to follow, " It doth not 
yet appear what we shall be." The future to all 
of us is a vast, unexplored region. In this day of 



THE SONS OF GOD. 85 

wonderful knowledge, when the remotest history 
is being transcribed from deciphered hieroglyphics, 
and sculptured slabs and tablets unburied from 
the sands that have hidden them for centuries ; 
in this day when adventurous science is unriddling 
every secret of earth and sea and sky, prying 
with the microscope into the most remote recesses 
of nature, penetrating with the telescope the infi- 
nite distances of space, making all the silence of 
the universe articulate, there is one side on which 
ignorance is still ignorance, and investigation 
makes no foot of advance. The other life, so 
near, so sure, so soon to be the experience of each 
one of us, what have we learned — what can 
we learn about that ? It is to-day, as ages ago, 
the great mystery that baffles the most enter- 
prising search. Multitudes of our friends have 
found out, are finding out about it every day, but 
only by the incommunicable revelations of death. 
We bend over their still faces, but their lips do 
not move to instruct us concerning the infinite 
secret. We stand over their graves, but no voice 
comes up from the sod under which they sleep, 
to tell us what we so greatly long to know. Be- 
yond the horizon line of this short earthly life 

" Nor eye nor listening car can aught discover." 
M It doth not yet appear what we shall be." 



86 THE SONS OF GOD. 

Now it is the peculiar office of religion to 
render this uncertainty not altogether painful. 
To the devout man it is an uncertainty of expec- 
tation rather than of fear. We are confident 
that we are to be, and that we are to be something 
better than we now are. Every-where in the 
universe where life is in harmony with its environ- 
ment there is constant progression. It is always 
" first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn 
in the ear." The conclusions from analogy are 
all in the line of confidence, but religion has 
something more than philosophy to give pith and 
substance to its expectations. 

There are certain old and uncontradicted words 
from the lips of Him whom it loves and calls 
Master that have the ring of certainty to them. 
"Because I live, ye shall live also." "In my 
Father's house are many mansions. ... I go to 
prepare a place for you." These promises are not 
minute in their specifications. They do not out- 
line the details of the life to come, but they do 
this unmistakably : they assert that there is such 
a life, and religion satisfies itself with the general 
assurance, even if it lacks the particular descrip- 
tion. The great fact is all that a child of God 
needs to know ; the special shades and outlines of 



THE SONS OF GOD. 87 

the fact are of secondary importance. It is the 
rare and choice prerogative of religion that it faces 
the vast, illimitable future without a fear. 

I sat one day this summer on the very edge of 
the great cataract of Niagara. The green waters 
swirled and boiled and plunged with thunderous 
roar into the depths with a shock that set the 
earth a-tremble, and out of the abysses into which 
they leaped the mists steamed up in clouds that 
almost obscured the sun. We who watched the 
impetuous push of the current and the headlong 
leap of the tide were awestruck and almost afraid, 
but over yonder on the very edge of the abyss, 
atmosphered with the rainbow mist, almost touch- 
ing with their wings the stupendous sweep of the 
water*, the swallows swam with easy wing, undis- 
mayed, and drinking refreshment from that which 
so amazed and overpowered us, the greater crea- 
tures of God. I know of no fitter emblem of 
Christian faith than that, friends. 

What a tremendous thought eternity is ! a 
life that runs on century after century, age after 
age, cycle after cycle, and yet no pause or end ! 
What is it to be? What are we to be in it? 
Science is dazed, philosophy is confounded, intel- 
lect has no words in which to articulate the great 



88 THE SONS OF GOD. 

reality; and yet on the very edge of the rush of 
its mighty tides the faith of the humblest Chris- 
tian poises itself with untroubled wing and finds 
refreshment in the infinite mystery. Tell us, you 
to whom the hereafter is a great Perhaps, you to 
whom the dying hour seems the saddest hour of 
life, tell us, is it worth any thing to have an un- 
shaken confidence that all will be well with us 
yonder ? There is such a thing not only possible 
but actual. Every testimony of a Christian life- 
time, every utterance of a Christian death-bed 
attests it. " It doth not yet appear what we shall 
be," but every religious soul facing the great here- 
after is able to look, undismayed, and say out of 
the depths of experience : — 

" I know not where His islands lift 
Their f ronded palms in air ; 
I only know I can not drift 
Beyond His love and care. 

And so beside the silent sea 

I sit with muffled oar ; 
No harm to me can come from Him 

On ocean or on shore." 

III. And then to all this the apostle adds that 
religion brings us great assurances. " It doth not 
yet appear what we shall be, but we know that 



THE SONS OF UOD. 89 

when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we 
shall see him as he is." That settles our future 
state. Character is its own condition. It is not 
so much matter where we are as what we are. 
" The mind is its own place, and of itself can 
make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." This 
much is certain : wherever he is, the believer is to 
be like Christ. Sometimes when we think about 
it that seems impossible. How little like Christ 
the best of us are now ! How many weaknesses 
of character there are in us ! How many sins we 
commit ! How little there is in us that reminds us 
of the perfectness of our Lord ! But all the same 
there is the assurance, " When he shall appear we 
shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." 

I recall a morning not long ago when I looked 
toward the eastern horizon, which I knew was but- 
tressed with great stretches of mountains, and the 
sight caught nothing but soft, gray folds of fog. To 
the eye the earth was one wide area of flatness, 
but behind the concealing curtains of mist the 
peaks were piled on peaks in one vast range of 
ruggedness, and as the sun rose higher and higher 
and the clouds dispersed, one by one the uplift of 
the great summits came into view. The mist was 
a tiling of the morning, the mountains were as old 



90 THE SONS OF GOD. 

as creation. In the case of all of us our aspira- 
tions are better than our accomplishments. It is 
slow work and hard work to build ourselves up 
into goodness. Always we seem to be a long way 
from the perfect pattern of life which our Lord 
gave us, and that we should ever match ourselves 
with him looks like an impossibility ; but behind 
the obscurity of the believer's doubts and fears 
looms up the vast certainty, the unrevoked promise 
of God : " We shall be like him, for we shall see 
him as he is." 

What of victory over self and sin we get now 
we get through our imperfect acquaintance with 
Christ ; standing face to face with him and know- 
ing him altogether, the influence and inspiration 
of his presence will work wonders. " We shall 
be like him " — what larger hope could men have ? 
Like him in character, not a stain on the soul's 
whiteness ; like him in purpose, not a trace of 
any thing mean or selfish in our plans and wishes ; 
like him in the steady sweep of our life towards 
its infinite possibilities; like him immortal, with 
all eternity in which to use our unfettered powers. 
Could there be a grander outlook and expectation 
than that ? 

Take that assurance, friends, as an unfailing 



THE SONS OF GOD. 91 

inspiration. In weak hours, when the work of 
life seems too hard for you ; in times of despond- 
ency, when you reckon up how little you have 
accomplished ; in moments when the burden of 
your sinfulness presses hard upon you; in your 
Gethsemanes of sorrow, where there seems nothing 
to experience but the agony and bloody sweat; 
in every time of need, remember that " when he 
shall appear we shall be like him." The hour is 
coming when life will put on its royalty, and we 
may well be contented a little while in the shadows, 
when the perfect day is so soon to dawn. 

And so, beloved, what better counsel can I give 
you than the earnest and affectionate request that 
you each one find out for yourselves what religion 
is and what it can do for you. If it is possible 
to be now a child of God and to live consciously 
watched over and led by his loving care, we each 
one of us need to be that. If it is possible to 
have our estimates so corrected and our vision so 
enlarged that we shall see that our present experi- 
ence is only a hint of what is to come, its best 
things shadows in comparison with the larger 
blessedness we are yet to know, that certainly is 
an expectation well worth the having. And if, 
in the struggle after a higher and nobler character 



92 THE SONS OF GOD. 

which we are all making, or ought to make, we 
may be encouraged by the assurance that by-and- 
by our imperfectly done work will be finished by 
the hands of the Master himself, so that nothing 
will be lacking which our largest aspirations seek, 
then certainly that is an inspiration which none of 
us can afford to be without. And all these things 
are blessedly true : the life of God in the soul, the 
expectation of immortal growth, the assurance of 
the perfectness of the heavens. Make all these 
things yours, friends. Be and live as children of 
God, feed your souls on the thought of the better 
things coming, and wait without a doubt for that 
hour when He who is our life shall appear, and 
you " shall be like him, seeing him as he is." 



(f 



V. 
l^ot^tng but leatieg/' 



"NOTHING BUT LEAVES." 1 

"And seeing a fig tree by the way side, he came to it, and 
found nothing thereon, but leaves only ; and he saith unto it, 
Let there be no fruit from thee henceforward for ever. And 
immediately the fig tree withered away. 19 — Matthew 21: 19. 

A LEAF is one of the most beautiful and 
wonderful objects in nature. It fulfills the 
double mission of grace and use. Just what the 
lungs are to man and animals, that the leaves 
are to the trees and shrubs. Vegetable equally 
with animal life depends upon and progresses by 
processes of respiration. We loosen and fertilize 
the soil about the roots of the tree in order to 
push on its growth, yet with all our pains we do 
but a small part of the work. The silent leaves 
above us, opening a thousand mouths on every 
branch, are the great feeders of fertility. All 
the day long, under the quickening chemistry 

1 Preached on board the steamship William Perm; copied by Stephen 

U; publicly read by him on board the steamship China on her 

fir-L vnyagQ from San Francisco to Yokohama, Japan; then printed at 

the office of The China Mail, Ilong Kong, and later published by the 

American Tract Society. 

95 



96 "NOTHING BUT LEAVES:' 

of light and heat, they eliminate and breathe 
in the healthy oxygen from the air, that vital- 
izes the sap and spreads beauty and strength to 
every fiber and cell, and all the night they breathe 
out the waste and refuse carbon. Tender and 
fragile as they are, veined more delicately than 
an infant's hand, seeming to cling so timidly 
to bough and twig, yet without them trunk and 
branch would wither and stand the dreary skele- 
tons of the life that had perished. But over 
and above their purposes of use, what grace and 
goodliness they give to nature, what marvelous 
varieties of form and size and shade thej r exhibit ! 
Look at them in spring-time, when they are 
coming out timidly one by one in that fresh, 
exquisite green attire, quickening the throbbings 
of every heart with their hints of life. Look at 
them in the thick-leaved splendor of June, when, 
massed and matted, they darken the ground with 
their cool and grateful shadow ; or watch them 
in autumn, when frost and ripeness fire the trees, 
and they flame gorgeous illuminations to swell 
the splendor of the triumphal march of harvest ; 
and in all their shifting phases alike they rejoice 
the eyes, and give warmth and color to the most 
unimpressive nature. 



"-NOTHING BUT LEAVES:' 97 

Yet the leaves of a tree once called forth the 
condemnation and the curse of Christ (Matt. 
21: 19). Walking with his disciples, he saw 
at a distance a fig-tree. In tropical countries 
the broad and luxuriant foliage of this tree 
makes it a notable object in the landscape. 
Weary and faint they hastened towards it, and 
stood under its shade ; beneath its spreading 
branches they found shelter from the burning 
heat. Had it been dry and leafless he would have 
passed it by ; but standing there full clothed in 
the splendor of Syrian summer, every bough quick 
with life, the processes of growth pushing on, 
because of its very appearance and seeming per- 
fectness he cursed it, so that presently it withered 
away. Because he found thereon " nothing but 
leaves ! " 

Men plant fruit-trees not for foliage, but for 
fruit. A leaf is not the last and highest result 
of growth, but only an intermediate product of 
the process, meant to be a help to the perfect 
consummation. It was food that Christ was 
seeking and not shade. It was high time that 
it should bo found. The fig appears before 
the leaf. That such a tree should be barren 
at such a season was sure proof that it was a 



98 "NOTHING BUT LEAVES." 

failure, so far as the highest end of its existence 
was concerned; and so, though it stood out a 
thing of beauty, broad-branched, thick-leaved, 
still because it bore "nothing but leaves," Christ 
condemned it, that it might be a type and 
warning to generations to come that lack 
of fruit-bearing is a sin against God, however 
attractive or promising a profession and life 
may be. 

And yet how many systems of faith and 
practice, accepted by multitudes and commended 
with unmeasured praise, after all bear " nothing 
but leaves." Every thoughtful man admits the 
legitimacy of this test of fruitfulness. He has 
no hope that a barren theory will win its way 
in the world. He hastens to show, when he 
urges his scheme upon you, what it has done 
and what it can do. We judge of systems as we 
do of seeds, which will give us the fullest ears 
and the most abundant harvests. But men 
often fail to discriminate clearly between leaf 
and fruit. It is contended sometimes by the 
advocates of an amended gospel and a liberal 
creed, that the forth-puttings of that system 
are its all-sufficient verification. We are pointed 
to the eloquent orators, the elegant scholars, 



"NOTHING BUT LEAVES" 99 

the graceful poets it produces. But eloquence 
and scholarship aud poetry are " nothing but 
leaves." Holiness of heart is the true fruit of 
a real gospel ; the clusters ripened by the grace 
of God hang higher than the growths of in- 
tellect. 

We are pointed to the earnest sympathy with 
man fostered by this genial faith ; to its varied 
philanthropic schemes for the betterment of the 
laboring classes, for the reclamation of the 
vicious, for the rescue of the down-trodden and 
oppressed ; but all these things, worthy as they 
are, are in comparison " nothing but leaves." 
The ripe fruit of genuine spiritual faith is salva- 
tion — a power that not merely ministers to 
bodily necessities or constrains to outward pro- 
prieties of conduct, but a power that goes deeper 
and does more thorough work — that purifies 
and renovates and sanctifies the soul. All else 
but this is as nothing. To mature this royal 
harvest the counsels of eternity were set. For 
this prophet and apostle were anointed with 
chrism divine. For this Jesus wept and suffered 
and died. For this the Holy Ghost, the Com- 
forter, came, and comes and strives. For this 
all powers of holy growth forever struggle ; and 



100 "NOTHING BUT LEAVES:' 

any system, however great its triumphs in other 
directions, that can not show regenerate souls 
as its fruits, let it boast as it may, its best results 
are " nothing but leaves." 

It is with the single soul, however, that this 
truth has the most to do ; it has an eminently 
practical bearing on the individual well-being. 
Let every man take such care of himself 
that he shall be genuinely fruitful, and it 
matters little about systems. And this is the 
great end of our creation. God has put you 
and me into this world, not to amass for- 
tunes, not to win great names, not to live 
easily and pleasantly, with as little trouble as 
possible, but to glorify him ; and " herein is 
my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit." 
And yet most men drive on as if the great 
object in life was to bear " nothing but leaves " 
— to enlarge one's social influence, to reach a 
higher social position, to multiply possessions. 
For things like these, nine tenths of human 
energy is expended. We are more anxious 
about the quantity than the quality of our 
growth ; we forget the one set purpose of our life. 
There are but few who so seclude themselves 
from the thrill and stir of the great multitude, 



-XOTBJXG BUT LEAVES.'* 101 

that they hear with distinctness God's message 
heir souls. We live in a thronged and busy 
world : we breathe its feverish air ; we catch 
the contagion of its enthusiasms and hopes. 
We look at its prizes through the bewildering 
glare of sense : we wish, not strangelv. to be 
and do as other men. and so we forget that in 
spite of the clamor and roar that fill the spiritual 
ear, a voice is sounding all the day. •• Son. daugh- 
ter, g : in my vineyard." The great end of 
life is mistaken, the powers and possibilities 
riven for holv and lasting use are emoloved in 
unworthy ways and for inferior ends, and we 
come to the end of our years, be they many or 
few. to find at the last and too late that all our 
3 me probation has borne for us % * nothing but 
leaves." 

It is of the first importance, therefore, for 
the wise conduct of life, that a man should 
.rnize his true mission as a fruit-bearer. It 
Qomical and successful labor 
that the Lould be accurately defined. Half 

the work in the world Ls wasted because men 
stril: sard. They hav i S] ecific aim. 

only a vague aeral desire to "get on." 

we the rule of success in 



102 "NOTHING BUT LEAVES" 

any direction when he said : " I therefore so run, 
not as uncertainly ; so fight I, not as one who 
beateth the air." Thrust a magnet into a heap of 
metallic particles and at once they assume set and 
crystalline forms. And distinctness of purpose 
has a magnetic power. It brings into proper po- 
sition and play every force that can bear upon the 
end to be obtained. It utilizes latent energies, 
and originates combinations of powers, and works 
every thing at full pressure, and with all the 
might of an unconquerable will presses on to 
triumph. 

Witness in proof of this the methods in which 
men of the world win their victories. Let a man 
make up his mind, like Girard, to be rich, and see 
how that determination works for him. Every 
thing else is held subordinate to that end. 
Body and soul become mere slaves to that over- 
mastering purpose. Hunger presses him, but he 
will not yield to appetite any further than is 
needful to get strength to make money. Pleasure 
wooes him, but he turns away from all its enchant- 
ments ; there is no money to be made by self- 
gratification. Taste urges its claim, but it can 
not be heeded, for it takes instead of makes 
money to satisfy it. He walks abroad, but it 






"NOTHING BUT LEAVES." 103 

is not to breathe the sweet air, nor gladden the 
eyes with the wonders of a world of beauty, but 
only to see where some new dollar may be found. 
Every thing he is or has or does strains 
toward the same end ; and that passionate enthu- 
siasm, laughing at obstacles, presses on till it 
grasps the prize for which it has dared and done 
all. There is no power like the might of a great 
determination. Nothing less than the divine can 
match it. When a thousand wires are welded 
into one, they forge the Damascus steel, that can 
divide the gossamer or cut the iron bar asunder ; 
and when all the energies of a man are molten 
into one force by the potent heat of purpose, 
they shape a blade invincible by aught but the 
flashing sword of Almightiness. 

Let a man then live, first and most of all, from 
the thought that his work in the world is to bring 
forth fruit to the honor and glory of God ; that 
whatever else is left undone, this must he done ; 
that however promising a project, it is to be re- 
jected if it interferes with the sovereign purpose. 
Let a man live so, and spiritual success is sure. 
For whatever power determination has in other 
departments, it is intensified in this. By special 
aids God speeds the purpose of righteousness 



104 "NOTHING BUT LEAVES." 

to fulfillment. The best laid human schemes 
sometimes miscarry by reason of perils and hin- 
drances that no man could foresee. But along 
the track we travel to do thy will, O God, 
there are no hidden reefs to wreck our ships, 
no billows to engulf them, no tempests to beat 
them back. The earnest soul journeys along a 
safe and sure highway, oyer which " the ran- 
somed of the Lord shall return and come to 
Mount Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon 
their heads." 

If you and I, then, are so conscious of our 
high vocation, and so faithful that we make this 
determination the supreme law of life, we may 
reasonably expect that our labor will ripen abun- 
dant fruit; not necessarily marvels of growth. 
It is a vice of human nature that it can not 
be satisfied unless it can do some wonderful 
thing. Every man sets out to be a great man, 
but very few get much farther than the start. 

This spirit besets us from the earliest years. 
The child, poring over the wonderful romances 
that form the mental food of his first days, 
longs for the time when he shall go out to 
slay giants and capture castles. The youth looks 
contemptuously upon the routine of daily life 



"NOTHING BUT LEAVES:' 105 

» commonplace for his abilities ; and as men 
get on to maturer years, do they quite forget 
to build castles in the clouds, whose splendor 
puts to shame the common walls in which they 
live and work ? The desire is all well in its 
way. but the trouble is, it keeps us dreaming 
when we should be working, and too often makes 
us discontented and disheartened, forgetting that 
God gives to the seeds of faithful endeavor we 
sow such a body as pleases him. and to every 
seed his own body. So long as a man is true 
to the task which God sets him. let him learn, 
in whatsoever state he is. therewith to be con- 
tent. I can not be the apostle Paul, but I 
will not worry about that : my sole concern is 
to ripen the best fruit I may where I am planted. 
And, moreover, marvels do not make up the bulk 
of life. The few prodigies of growth which the 
burner brings to the agricultural fair are excep- 
3, not specimens of his harvest. His barns 
and cellars are filled with something quite differ- 
ent from what is contained in the single basket. 
The £ both nature and life is made up 

of what we call commonalties. God never 
it that men should be all the time doing 
wonderful things: if they did. they would cease 



106 "NOTHING BUT LEAVES." 

to be wonderful. We esteem them marvelous 
simply because they are infrequent ; and if you 
come to the real truth of the matter, those 
relative epithets, great and small, as we use 
them, amount to almost nothing. If an apple 
grows till it measures a foot, we call it a prod- 
igy; but it is not near so much of a prodigy 
as that the smallest apple should grow at all. 
The process itself, and not its extent, is the real 
wonder. The evening prayer lisped by the child 
is just as really, just as worthily, just as accept- 
ably praise as the triumphant strain from the 
harp-strings of the seraphim. Your victory over 
some common temptation is just as wonderful 
as the rout of the rebellious hosts of heaven. 
The Christian graces that ripen in your humble 
life are as great a marvel, and glow as brightly 
in the sight of God, as the twelve manner of 
fruits that hang on the tree planted by the crystal 
river of Paradise. And just this kind of fruit 
men in every station may bring forth every 
day. 

But my lot in life, you say, is so humble, and 
my experience has so little that is noteworthy, 
what can I do ? " Whether therefore ye eat, or 
drink," says the apostle, " or whatsoever ye do, 



"NOTHING BUT LEAVES." 107 

do all to the glory of God." Let a man thank 
God that he can glorify him in common things. 
Nor let him forget that in modest walks and un- 
obtrusive ways he may chance to make the most 
acceptable offering. When God paints a flaunting 
lily, he dashes on the rawest of colors ; but the 
little violet is tinted with heaven's own hue. 
The Alpine strawberry, no larger than a pea, is 
sweetest of all the fruits of the field. Nature 
compacts her choicest flavors and colors, and seals 
them up in the smallest of flasks, and the man 
who pierces down to the lowest stratum of life, 
and sanctifies the common word and act, evi- 
dences thereby a richer and fuller grace than he 
who stands up in the pulpit to preach, or sets 
himself sword in hand at the head of the hosts 
of some great reform. 

As a general rule, rich and rare fruits are 
ripened slowly. Some of the most eminent 
forth-puttings of pious growth have been long 
in maturing. Men have spent years in pushing 
on silent but patient processes : and because 
there was no speedy result adequate to the 
labor, the world said: " Lo, these are barren 
tires ; they bear nothing but leaves." Yet just 
as the unsightly cactus bequeathed from father 



108 "NOTHING BUT LEAVES." 

to son, wearing away the life-time of three genera- 
tions without hint of beauty or use, at last, when 
the full century is rounded, flowers out into 
one full, consummate blossom, filled with the 
juices of a hundred years, so at length the fruit of 
these earnest workers appears. For thirty years 
Jesus was as a root out of a dry ground, without 
form or comeliness, till the royal hour of his 
ripeness struck ; and then what age was ever 
so magnificently blossomed as the brief years 
of his ministry? What other era of time has 
borne such fruits as Gethsemane and Calvary? 
It matters not though men call our lives barren, 
if with faithful and unwearying culture we are 
carrying out the plans of the great Husbandman. 
When God pleases, the harvest long ripening 
will appear all the more impressive from the 
unsuspected quiet out of which it has grown. 

Almost every life has its crises and turning- 
points of greater or less magnitude. There are 
single hours and acts that, like rudders, steer us 
into wide seas of triumph or misfortune. In 
their significance and influence they stand sol- 
emn and apart from the rest of life. But there 
is no other so wonderful epoch in a man's history 
as the time when, after years of barrenness, or 



"NOTHING BUT LEAYESr 109 

at best " nothing but leaves," he becomes at last 
genuinely fruitful. You have read that thrill- 
ing story of the broken cable stretched along 
the ocean's bed for more than a thousand miles ; 
how " night and day for a whole year the electri- 
cian had been watching its tiny signal ray; 
how sometimes wild, incoherent messages came 
from the deep, spelt out by magnetic storms 
and earth currents, till of a sudden, on a morn- 
ing, the unsteady flickering changed to cohe- 
rency ; and after the long interval that had 
brought nothing but the moody and delirious 
mutterings of the sea, stammering over its 
alphabet in vain, the cable began to speak, and 
to transmit the appointed signals which indi- 
cated human purpose and method at the other 
end, instead of the hurried signs, broken speech, 
and inarticulate cries of the illiterate Atlantic." 
But that is a more wonderful hour when over 
the living wires of the soul, long speaking in 
stammering and incoherent phrase, as the earth 
currents and the storms of sense and sin have 
uttered themselves, there comes at length the 
unmistakable pulse of thought and feeling from 
the infinite wisdom, and God begins to speak 
through that soul to men by the signals of holy 



J 1 "JW> THING B TJT LEA VES." 

words and works. The thrill and ecstasy of that 
hour will never be lost. It will be the bright, 
consummate center of life, for not two continents 
but two worlds are then wedded into one. 

How is it with you, my brother ? Does 
Christ, when he comes to you, as he comes daily, 
find a fruitful life, or " nothing but leaves " ? 
Give heed to the lessons of every autumn hour, 
that leaves, however fair, soon fall and per- 
ish, while the fruit is gathered into garners. 
What provision are you making for the coming 
time, when the summer shall be past and the 
frosts of winter fall ? Let you and me strive 
for lives rich in lasting results, and whatever 
of help and success we may seek for the further- 
ance of our cherished plans, still let our supreme 
prayer be : — 

" Something, my God, for thee, 
Something for thee! 
That each day's setting sun may bring 
Some penitential offering; 
In thy dear name some kindness done, 
To thy dear love some wanderer won — 
Some trial meekly borne, 
Dear Lord, for thee ! " 



VI. 



mm $i)aii ty& e$tt& be? 



VI. 

WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 

"And all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the 
hill country of Judaea. And all that heard them, laid them up 
in their heart, saying, What then shall this child be? For the 
hand of the Lord was with him." — Luke 1 : 65, 66. 

rT^HIS is a part of the story which is told in the 
- *- New Testament about a boy named John. 
His father, whose name was Zacharias, was a 
minister, and one day while he was conducting the 
service in the church, some time before John was 
born, he found all of a sudden that he had lost 
his voice. The congregation did not know what 
to make of it ; only a few minutes before they had 
heard him talking, and now he stood up in the 
pulpit, saying nothing and making signs with his 
fingers, which of course they did not understand. 
He was no better the next day, nor the next, and 
so several weeks went on, and Zacharias had to 
make his way round among his friends trying the 
best he could to talk to them with his fingers. 
The day John was born there was a good deal of 
talk in the family as to what the new boy should 

113 



114 WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 

be called. You know how it is at such times, how 
much talk there is. After they had discussed the 
matter about a week, the friends said, " He 
ought to be named Zacharias, after his father." 
But his mother said, " No, I am going to call him 
John." " John ! " the friends said, " what makes 
you call him John ? None of your relatives were 
called John, Father, grandfather, great-grand- 
father, uncles, cousins, there is not a John among 
them all." But the mother would not change her 
mind, so they tried to make the father understand 
that they wanted to know what he thought about 
it. Zacharias could not talk out a name on his 
fingers, so he got a piece of smooth white sheep- 
skin and a pen and wrote down, " His name is 
John." Just as soon as he had written that, his 
speech all came back to him, and he could talk as 
well as ever, and the first thing he did with his 
new voice was to thank God ; and so after all the 
dispute, it was settled in this strange way that the 
boy should be called John, a name which means 
"the gift of God." 

It was not any thing strange, then, that people 
should be curious to know how that boy was 
going to turn out. So many wonderful things had 
happened the first week of his life that they were 



WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE/ 115 

quite certain that he would not grow up to be a 
common man. All the friends and relations and 
neighbors used to talk about it, and they talked 
so much that the story got out, and all through 
that part of the country men and women and 
children heard about the remarkable baby in that 
town among the hills; and instead of asking about 
the color of his eyes, and how much he weighed, 
and that sort of questions which we sometimes 
hear in these days, the question which eveiy 
h »dy asked was this : " What then shall this child 
be*/*' They wanted to look ahead a good many 
years. They wished they knew what sort of a 
I >< > v at school John would be, and what kind of a 
young man, and what he would do when he set up 
in life for himself. Of course about a great many 
things they could only guess, but there was one 
thing which they were all sure of, that he would 
be something remarkable, " for the hand of the 
Lord was with him." 

Now just that question which those people 

in far-away Judaea eighteen hundred years ago 

1 about baby John, serious men and women 

. s feel like asking about every boy 

and girl they know, " What then shall this 

child be?" Do you wonder why they are eurioiLS 



116 WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 

about that? It is because they know to what 
great things every child may grow. You go out 
some bright autumn day into the woods, and sit 
down under a tree and begin to play with the 
smooth acorns that lie thick upon the grass. How 
small and light they are ; you can hold a half-dozen 
of them in your hand. You snap them at each 
other as if they were marbles, and laugh when you 
make a good shot. Now get up and look at the 
tree. Put your arms round the trunk ; oh, but it 
is too large, you can not reach. See those great 
limbs overhead ; any one of them is stout enough 
to bear your weight. Then try to count the 
hundreds of branches and the thousands of leaves 
that are swinging and dancing in the sun. What 
a monster of a tree ! Yes ; but there is one just 
like it in every one of those acorns you are tossing 
about; a great oak-tree is nothing but an acorn 
grown up. You say, What a difference between 
the tree and the acorn ! But there is more difference 
between the little child, helpless in its mother's 
arms, and the grown-up man, who is not only 
bigger in body, but bigger in mind, and has got to 
be a famous general, or President, or distinguished 
scholar, and can manage armies or govern a nation. 
Every boy here this morning has in him the 






WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 117 

makings of a good man, and if lie is only managed 
right and manages himself right, before many 
years he will be making his mark in the world. 
Every girl here this morning has in her the begin- 
nings of a sweet Christian woman, and if she is 
taken care of, and takes care of herself, before 
long will be looked up to and respected and loved. 
When every child has the chance of being so 
much, it is no wonder that when we look into the 
face of a boy or girl, we feel like asking the 
question, " What then shall this child be ? " 

There is one great trouble about answering that 
question. You can not by just looking at a child 
even guess how the child will turn out. If I look 
at an acorn, I know just what will happen if I 
plant it. I can tell beforehand what sort of a 
tree will come up, what the shape and color of 
the leaves will be, what rough brown bark it will 
have, but when I look into these bright young 
faces, how can I or any body tell just what these 
children will be by-and-by ? I can not point to 
one boy and say he will be a successful merchant, 
and to another and say he will be governor of the 
state ; or to these girls, and say this one will be a 
teacher, and that one will paint beautiful pictures, 
and so on through the whole list. Nobody but 



118 WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 

God can tell about those things. Some of those 
children may, I hope all of them will, grow up to 
be the joy and pride of their parents and a bless- 
ing to the world ; and some of them may, but God 
forbid that any of them should, grow up to be a 
sorrow to father and mother and a curse to society. 
But who knows any thing about it, as they sit 
together here this morning, smiling and happy? 
Sometimes when I look at a company of young- 
people, I feel as I do when I see the postman 
carrying round the mail. Do you ever watch him 
and think what different messages he is bringing 
to different people ? He has a bundle of letters 
in his hand, and they look very much alike. Most 
of them have smooth white envelopes with a little 
green stamp in one corner, and you can hardly 
tell one from another by seeing the outside. But 
what a difference there is in the inside ! He 
leaves a letter at one house, and the mother opens 
it and reads that the girl who has been away at 
school is coming home to-morrow, and how glad all 
the children are when they hear it. He leaves 
another letter that looks just like it at the next 
house, and the father opens it and reads that the 
boy who went away to sea last year has died of 
fever on the African coast far away from his 



WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 119 

friends, and how all the family mourn and weep ! 
He drops a letter at some business man's office, 
and he opens it and reads that some investment 
has turned out well and he is a great many 
thousand dollars richer ; and the letter he leaves 
for the next man tells him that he has lost all his 
property and must begin life over again. What 
different messages to different people in those 
white envelopes that look so much alike, news of 
deaths and births, of marriages and funerals, of 
good and bad fortune, of joy and sorrow! But 
who can tell which is which, or what is in any of 
them by just seeing the outside of these letters? 
It is precisely so with a company of children : 
each one of them has some sort of message to 
the world. The things they are going to do, the 
lives they are going to live, the men and women 
they are going to be, what an influence that will 
have ! how many hearts they will make glad or 
sad! But who can tell which will be which, and 
pick out the boys and girls that will be useful 
men and women, and the others who will do no 
good while they live, and the world will be glad 
to have dead and out of the way? Nobody can 
tell. These children in their fresh young life 
are like letters in the envelopes. The message 



120 WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 

they are to bring the world is inside, and we can 
not read the writing. Nobody but God knows 
just what and how much their lives are to 
mean. 

It would be a grand thing, then, would it not, if 
there were some way in which young people could 
make it certain that they would be nothing but 
good and do nothing but good as long as 
they lived, and so could look forward to all 
the years to come and be sure that they would 
be years of happiness and usefulness ? Well, 
the blessed truth about the matter is that we 
can know all that we really need to know. 
God has not told us, and so nobody can tell us 
beforehand just what sort of houses we are going 
to live in or what kind of business we are going 
to follow ; whether we are to be carpenters, or 
machinists, or railroad men, or merchants, or 
housekeepers, or school-teachers ; whether we 
shall have a great deal of money or very little ; 
but God has told us, and so every body ought to 
know, how to increase in gentleness and goodness 
and influence every year, and reach the home in 
heaven at last. It is a good deal with our lives as 
it is with sailing in ships. A man who is going 
from this country to England does not know 



WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 121 

which way the wind will blow every day of the 
voyage ; or whether the sea will be rough or 
smooth ; but he has got a chart and a compass, and 
he does know that if the vessel is steered in the 
right direction, and the engine keeps thundering 
away in the hold, and the screw propeller is all the 
time turning round and round, and the sailors are 
on the lookout for danger, he will make a good 
passage and in due time step on shore at Liver- 
pool, which is the thing he most wants to know 
and do. God does not tell every thing which will 
happen to us. but he does tell us how we, every 
one of us, can make our lives beautiful and 
blessed, so that our friends will be proud of us 
and people will be glad that they know us, and, 
best of all, God will be satisfied with us and say 
to us : " Well done, good and faithful servants." 

And now I suppose you will ask, at least I 
certainly hope you will ask, " What is this way, 
God's good and true way of living ? " How can I. 
Charles, Richard, Thomas, James, Harry, be such a 
boy and become such a man that I shall be glad 
and every body else will be glad that I am in 
this beautiful world ? How can I, Mary, Nellie, 
Lizzie, Carrie, Edith, be such a girl and become 
such a woman that I shall be a light in the home, 



122 WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 

an ornament to society, and loved every-where and 
always ? Well, to answer that question, we shall 
have to go back to the story of baby John. We 
read in the New Testament how he grew up to be 
a famous man, and multitudes crowded to hear 
him tell about the coming Redeemer, and our 
Saviour said of him, " Among them that are born 
of women, there hath not arisen a greater than 
John." And the reason for it all is given in those 
last words of our text, which I hope every child 
will commit to memory and never forget; those 
simple but very blessed words, " For the hand of 
the Lord was with him." 

"For the hand of the Lord was with him." 
What do those words mean ? Two things in par- 
ticular. First of all, they mean that God was 
all the time showing John what to do and how to 
live. The boy had a good father and mother who 
taught him what was right, and he had the Old 
Testament which he used to study, and the church 
to which he went on the Sabbath, and as he paid 
attention to what he learned he was not very 
likely to go wrong. But besides that, God used 
to teach him by his Spirit. He helped him to 
understand things so that he should not make 
mistakes, and he stirred up his conscience so that 



WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 123 

he was unwilling to do what was not right, and so 
though John could not see God, nor hear him 
speak, yet he felt sure that it was God who was 
leading him, and every one of us may have the 
hand of the Lord with us in just the same way. 
We have the Old Testament and the New besides, 
the whole Bible, in which we find written down the 
rules which direct all right living, and we have the 
church and the Sabbath-school, and many of 
us have good instruction at home. So far as 
these things go we are quite as well off as John, 
and then, too, God comes to us in just the same 
way he did to him, and makes us understand and 
feel and see, so that we have no excuse for going 
wrong. It was wonderfully good in God to give 
us the Bible and Church and Sabbath-school, but 
do you ever think how much more it means that 
he should come to us every day by his Spirit, and 
make dark things plain, so that when we find it 
hard to make up our minds he makes them up for 
us and we become sure of what we ought to do ? 

Perhaps you have been out driving sometimes 
in a part of the country where you had never 
been before, and you got to a place where 
three or four roads all came together and 
you did not know which you ought to take. 



124 WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 

While you were wondering you saw a tall post, 
and on the post a flat board, and on the board a hand 
was painted, and some words, so that you read, 
Danvers so many miles, and Springfield so many, 
and Salem so many. Well, that was a good thing, 
and as you drove along the strange road you said : 
" I don't know whether this is the right way, but 
anyhow the hand of the guide-board is with me." 
And then a little further on you came to a house 
and saw a man sitting on the steps, and if you did 
as I often do up in New Hampshire, you stopped 
and asked him to tell you the way to the place 
which you wanted to reach; and the man came out 
and pointed with his hand and said, " Keep 
straight on." You were perfectly sure then, and 
when you got into a bit of woods where you 
could see only a little way ahead, you were not 
at all troubled, but you said : "I know I am going 
right, for the hand of the man is with me, and he 
knows all about it." How thoughtful and tender 
in God to do just that for you and me, and when 
the Bible is not quite plain to us, and we don't 
quite understand what we heard in the church, to 
have him whisper in our minds and hearts, " This 
is the way." How certain we are to go right 
when the hand of the Lord is with us. 



WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE f 125 

And these words mean one thing more, that 
God not only tells us what to do, but he helps us 
to do it. Never forget that God is always with 
you. He looked after John, and when he saw he 
was in trouble he assisted him, made him stronger 
and persevering, or reminded him of some prom- 
ise that put new life into him. If we only let 
him, he does that thing for us all the time. I 
specially want these young people to believe and 
remember that we are never in any difficulty that 
God is not near enough and willing to help us out. 
We forget him very often, but he never forgets. 
Whether we are asleep or awake, at home or 
abroad, reading, studying, walking, playing, work- 
ing, wherever we are, he is close to us. He hears 
us every time we ask him to assist us, and he 
always answers, and if the hand of the Lord is 
with us we need not be afraid. Nothing can 
harm us or keep us from going straight on. We 
can do all things with his help, and trusting in him 
our lives will be safe and grow beautiful ; we shall 
get the better of one evil thing after another, and 
when we are all through with the world it will be 
found, as the apostle Paul has told us, that we 
have come off " conquerors and more than con- 
querors through him that loved us." 



126 WHAT SHALL THIS CHILD BE? 

I have hosts of good wishes in my heart for all 
the young people here to-day: that if God wills 
they may have long and happy lives ; that they 
may be spared from sickness and sorrow and 
suffering ; that they may never know poverty and 
want ; but no wish of all is so strong as the wish 
that it may be truly said of them, as it was of 
John, that " the hand of the Lord is with them." 
And when you look back in future years to this 
bright June day, I hope it will be best remem- 
bered, not for the flowers with which your friends 
have made the place beautiful for you, for flowers 
will fade, nor even for the kind words which are 
said to you, for the voices that speak them may 
be silent then ; but I hope it will be remembered 
as the day when each for himself and herself 
decided to try and live a true, earnest Christian 
life, with God for a friend and leader and helper, 
to obey him the greatest pleasure, and so when 
the divine favor was secured and peaceful days 
on earth made certain, and after them the joys of 
heaven forever. 



VII. 

TBelotoeti for t^e fathers' ^afee. 



VII. 
BELOVED FOR THE FATHERS' SAKE. 

"They are beloved for the fathers' sake." — Romans 11 : 28. 

rnHERE is something very wonderful and 
-*- pathetic about the affection of God for 
the ancient people of Israel. They were se- 
lected at first from among the nations of the 
earth to serve as the channel through which 
the divine will and grace might be made known 
to men. It pleased God for reasons known to 
himself, which were undoubtedly good reasons, 
to undertake the religious education of a race 
by a peculiar method. Certain simple truths, 
which could be easily apprehended, he taught 
universally by a series of object-lessons. He 
made the framework of physical nature sugges- 
tive and articulate of his power and wisdom and 
government, so that the heavens arching over 
all lands should declare the glory of God, and 
the blue scroll of the firmament should every- 
where show his handiwork. He puts into the 
orderly succession of times and seasons a spirit- 

129 



130 BELOVED FOB THE FATHEBS* SAKE, 

ual significance, so that day unto day should 
utter speech of him, and night unto night show 
knowledge. He put also into the human con- 
stitution the faculty of conscience, the sense of 
right and wrong, and the feeling of praise and 
blame, and so all men had and always have had 
the germs at least of the three great ideas of 
God, righteousness, and responsibility. 

But that knowledge was at best only alphabetic 
and quite insufficient. In endeavoring to combine 
those ideas, and out of their relations to educe 
the laws of right living, all history shows that 
men have blundered, and tangled themselves in 
a snarl of contradictions and confusion, so that 
their knowledge has been a curse rather than 
a blessing. Larger light was needed, more de- 
tailed and minute instruction, positive laws and 
institutions, moral problems actually worked out 
in human experience to serve as examples and 
illustrations of how the thing was to be done. 
So God chose out one nation to be the world's 
school-master; walled it in by severe restrictions 
of non-intercourse with other nations, that it might 
have leisure and space for the peculiar instruction 
it was to receive ; kept constantly before it the 
idea that the spiritual uses and possibilities of 



BELOVED FOB THE FATHERS' SAKE. 131 

life were of principal importance; gave it special 
and increasing revelations as the people grew 
able to comprehend them, and then gave the 
nation such an emphatic position that all the 
world could see and judge of the results of 
that unique course of training. To compare 
things human and divine, just as the inventor 
of some wonderful and complicated piece of 
mechanism that is destined to effect large 
changes in industrial enterprise first makes a 
working model and puts it on exhibition that 
men may see for themselves its practical utility, 
so God made the Jewish nation a pattern of 
what could be acquired and effected by a knowl- 
edge and observance of his laws. It had a still 
higher function to discharge. The Israelitish 
people were God's normal pupils, trained to be 
teachers, divinely instructed in both matter and 
methods, and sent out for the enlightenment and 
salvation of the world. 

By virtue of their occupancy of that office the 
Jews were especially dear to God. Standing as 
they did, the medium of communication between 
him and an ignorant and lost world, he was eager 
to instruct and save them; they had peculiar 
claims upon his affection. When we remember 



132 BELOVED FOB THE FATHEBS' SAKE. 

their significant position, it seems nothing won- 
derful that he should have been so constant and 
painstaking in his care ; that he should rain down 
bread from heaven for their hunger, and cleave 
the rocks into water - springs when they were 
thirsty ; that he should march before them in 
the changing pomp of cloud by day and fire by 
night; that he should kindle the glory of his 
visible presence in tabernacle and temple ; that 
he should swing the sword of his almightiness 
over the battle-field where they fought with 
their enemies ; that he should lead them into 
the possession of the vineyards and harvest-fields 
of Canaan. They were his elect people, carrying 
out his purposes, sometimes blindly, often in a 
blundering fashion, not infrequently reluctantly, 
but still in the main doing it. They sinned, but 
they repented ; they turned back, but they rallied 
and went on again, slowly clearing their way 
wedgewise into the gnarled mass of brutality and 
unrighteousness that oppressed the earth and 
defied heaven. God loved them for what they 
were attempting and in part accomplishing. It 
was his work, and the workers were precious in 
his sight. 

But more than this, among the many there 



BELOVED FOE THE FATHERS* SAKE. 133 

were some who were eminently worthy of being 
loved for their own sakes. What grand patterns 
of humanity shine like stars all along the line 
of Old Testament history : Abraham, so loyal to 
God ; Joseph, so illustrious in faith ; Moses, so 
obedient ; Joshua, so valiant ; kings and common 
men so devout ; prophets so impassioned and 
bold. How long and how splendid the roll of 
ancient worthies ! And if there is any thing 
which God loves it is good and true men. In 
poor human fashion they are reproductions of 
his own divine righteousness, photographs, dim 
and blurred perhaps, of himself, but not so 
blurred and dim but that the likeness is traceable. 
Men after God's own heart : how inexpressibly 
dear they are to him! He never forsakes them 
or forgets them. Earthly experiences are shaped 
with reference to their well-being, all things work 
together for their good, " and they shall be mine, 
saith the Lord of hosts, in the day when I make 
up my jewels." 

But this love of God for Israel had a still 
wider range. They were a people that greatly 
tried his patience all along the line of their 
history, and there came a time at last when they 
openly took issue with him. Their peculiar office 



134 BELOVED FOB THE FATHEBS' SAKE. 

as a people was at an end when Jesus Christ 
appeared. Ritual and sacrifice, on which they 
laid so much stress, all foreshadowed and reached 
forward toward him, and when he came, the 
world's Redeemer, the special sanctity of Juda- 
ism passed away, and the wide gospel was offered 
to the wide earth. That last and crowning reve- 
lation the Jews rejected. They were very bitter 
against the Lord's Christ, although he was the 
end of their law to salvation, the royal and 
resplendent blossom for whose blooming the 
spiritual forces of thousands of years had been 
working. £ou know the story of their spite 
and persecution, intensifying through all the 
period of the Redeemer's ministry, until it 
culminated at last in his crucifixion at their 
hands. It was a hatred that outlasted his death 
and showed itself in their rage against his 
disciples and in their savage attempts to crush 
out the early Christian Church. It would have 
seemed nothing strange if God had resented such 
an interference with his plans, and had cast the 
frown of his wrathful face upon them and given 
them over to swift destruction. But how differ- 
ently he dealt with them! On the very eve of 
his death Jesus stands over against the city and 



BELOVED FOB THE FATHERS' SAKE. 135 

cries : ,4 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often 
would I have gathered thee, as a hen gathereth 
her chickens, and ye would not." On the Mount 
of Ascension Christ gives as his last commission, 
" Go, teach all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." 
The inspired apostle declares : " My heart's desire 
and prayer to God for Israel is, that it may be 
saved." The Epistles are full of the divine yearn- 
ings over the rebellious people. So far as the 
record shows, God's love for them, instead of 
waning, grew in the same ratio in which they for- 
feited all right to it by their stubbornness and sin. 
The writer to the Romans comes forward with 
an explanation of this wonderful fact. He 
makes no attempt to slur over their sin, or to 
apologize for it ; he freely admits that as touch- 
ing this gracious gospel, they are enemies, their 
- set as a flint against it ; but for all that they 
arc not cast off, and scorned, and trampled under 
foot, but they are still "beloved for the fathers' 
Bake." God remembers Abraham and Moses, and 
Joshua and David, and all the mighty ancestry 
oi this rebellious people, and for the sake of 
those who served him so gloriously, he keeps in 
his heart an affection for their recreant children. 
"For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine 



136 BELOVED FOE THE FA THEE S' SAKE. 

elect," he says, "I have even called thee by 
thy name, though thou hast not known me." It 
was a wonderful thing for those proud and defiant 
sinners that they came from such pious stock. 
That fact moved God to forbearance, and because 
of it he rained blessing upon them in spite of 
their unworthiness. 

'•Beloved for the fathers' sake." The Jews 
did not have the exclusive property right in 
that gracious condescension of God. It still ex- 
ists and is still operative. It evidences its reality 
in a variety of ways. How many men and 
women here to-day who are living Christian lives 
owe their faith and hope largely to pious parents. 
It was not inherited, but God loved those fathers 
and mothers of yours, and he knew the yearnings 
of their hearts for your salvation, and so he 
surrounded you with all gracious influences, and 
was not discouraged by many failures, and multi- 
plied inducements and persuasions and warnings 
and counsels, until you were led to accept Christ 
as your Redeemer and Lord. It is altogether 
probable, too, that some here to-day who have no 
interest in religion, but are in fair repute in the 
world and blessed with earthly prosperity, owe 
the mercies they so unworthily enjoy to God's 



BELOVED FOB THE FATHERS' SAKE. 137 

esteem for their holy parentage. "The Lord 
sed the house of Pharaoh for his servant 
Joseph's sake," and the relation between father 
and child is closer than that of master and ser- 
vant. These religious homes from which so many 
of us came out, who can tell how far the gra- 
cious shadow of the roof-tree extends ? Scholars 
attempt with some measure of success to un- 
riddle the workings of the law of heredity, but 
no science can explain the subtler, diviner fact 
that God finds in the faith and righteousness of 
the parent the occasion and reason for the tender 
consideration of the child. This only we know, 
but this certainly we know, that it is a wonderful 
blessing to have had a pious ancestry, for in some 
strange but very real way the children are "be- 
d for the fathers' sake." 
It is (juite evident, then, that this fact lays a 
new burden of responsibility upon those who are 
parents. It is the characteristic of well-ordered 
household life that the elder serve the younger. 
Take any home that deserves the name and it 
is wonderful to see how largely the plans are 
made and the domestic wheels move with refer- 
to the welfare of the children. It is the 
most natural thing in the world. Leaving out 



138 BELOVED FOB THE FATHEBS' SAKE. 

of account the peculiar and imperative impulse 
of parental affection, how much it means to have 
absolute control of the training of a child. What 
infinite possibilities are waiting to be developed, 
what plastic material to be handled and shaped, 
capable of being fashioned into the splendor of 
an angel or the ugliness of a fiend. Men are not 
omnipotent, but they are never so near it as in 
the matter of bringing up the young committed 
to their care. Every generation is in a large 
sense responsible for the future of human history. 
With proper management, how irresistible home 
influence is ! How the theories of father and 
mother, their habits of thought, ways of life, 
affections and antipathies, narrowness or breadth, 
ambitions and estimates, as a rule, are handed on, 
and re-appear in the younger members of the 
household. The seeming exceptions to this rule 
are largely due to faulty or careless methods of 
education. And whoever considers what a man 
may be, both on the heaven side and the hell side 
of his nature, and realizes that in the training 
of his child the making of a man is almost 
absolutely in his hands, may well devote to that 
object the best of his energies and the bulk of 
his time. When we remember how much is 



BELOVED FOB THE FATHERS' SAKE. 139 

involved, it is nothing strange that parents plan 
and labor and endure and sacrifice, to secure for 
their sons and daughters reputable and influential 
positions in life. 

And certainly if that purpose is commendable, 
it is eminently wise in parents to secure ,the best 
things for their children. There are some hard- 
gotten inheritances that are of questionable value. 
It is not entirely sure that to leave a large estate 
is to transmit a positive blessing. In all our 
cities and towns are idle and shiftless men and 
women, made shiftless and idle by inherited 
wealth. They are of no use in the community. 
They loiter and dawdle and saunter and simper 
through life, as though the universe were ad- 
ministered in their private interest. They are 
too lazy to work, too imbecile to have strong 
convictions, too selfish to be sympathetic, too 
enamored of their own little, shriveled, pam- 
pered, inconsiderable personality to be aware 
that there is any body else of importance in 
the world. Their idea of life is a succession of 
pleasures and frivolities, to be in the fashion and 
to kill time, and they look for a heaven of well- 
furnished parlors and full-dress receptions. To 
bring up children to play that part in society 



140 BELOVED FOB THE FATHEBS" SAKE. 

is to entail misery upon them and inflict a curse 
upon the world. 

So of some other things of which we commonly 
make great account, social position, a famous 
family name, political influence ; these things, 
however good in themselves, have their limitations 
and their evil possibilities. There is only one 
thing which a man can transmit to his children, 
which is absolutely without flaw and potent for 
nothing but good, and that is the memory of 
a devout and righteous life. " I leave," said 
Patrick Henry in his will, " I leave to my chil- 
dren the Christian religion. With it they are 
rich, if they do not own a dollar ; without it 
they are poor, though they possess millions." 
And there is no so sure way in which a man can 
transmit that inheritance as by living a Christian 
life himself. The recollection of it in the years 
after he is gone is a will written in unfading 
ink, with no technicalities over which lawyers 
can quarrel and set aside the intention of the 
testator. The memories of a religious home. 
who can ever shake himself quite free from their 
restraining and gracious influence ? Men who 
have removed their residence from the Atlantic 
coast to the West have told us how often in 



BELOVED FOR THE FATHERS' SAKE. 141 

the night time, when the winds were high, they 
have seemed to hear rising above the rustle of 
the prairie grasses, or the roar of the tossing 
branches, the deep, solemn boom of the sea 
breaking upon the shore ; for the music of the 
surges once heard can never more be utterly 
silenced, but eveiy now and then mingles its 
majestic chords with the strains and sounds of 
our many voiced life. The recollections of a 
religious home, how permanent they are, how 
stored with power! They come to men in great 
crises of life, and make them stalwart when 
they were on the point of giving up the hard 
fight with evil. The calm faces of a devout father 
and mother flash before them in some time of 
mental bewilderment, when they are just read}^ 
to pronounce religion a lie and God himself 
a superstition, and faith recovers its poise and 
steadies itself, and always the charmed atmos- 
phere of the remembered home-life is about them, 
even in their farthest wanderings and deepest 
degradation, making it hard for them to get 
utterly beyond hope. Let men bless God that 
he has given such sweep of influence to simple 
Christian living, and specially let every parent 
see to it that he and she live those simple 



142 BELOVED FOB THE FATHEBS' SAKE. 

Christian lives, that when they are laid away 
in silence, and can speak no audible word of 
counsel or persuasion through the impenetrable 
wall of death, they may still admonish and 
restrain and encourage their children, by the 
remembrance they have left them of a devout 
faith and conversation. 

And this is not all. The parent who himself 
leads a Christian life, thereby brings his children 
into the covenant company of those who are 
"baloved for the fathers' sake." I say covenant 
company. This is no trick of words or pleasant 
superstition. The promise was made long ago 
to pious Abraham : " I will be a God to thee 
and to thy seed after thee," and the promise has 
never been abrogated. "Leave thy fatherless 
children," God said to the holy prophet, "and I 
will preserve them alive." This is not cant or 
fanaticism, but a blessed reality. There is noth- 
ing strange about it either. If you are true man 
or woman you have a tenderness for all little 
ones, but you have a warmer interest in the chil- 
dren of your intimate friend than in those of a 
stranger. And how much it means that while the 
world's great army of children are watched over 
and cared for by God, there are some who are spe- 



BELOVED FOB THE FA TREES' SAKE. 143 

cially "beloved for the fathers' sake." How often 
it has brought comfort to a dying mother to hand 
over her child to some true and tried friend, who has 
promised to take it and train it as her own. But 
what infinitely greater comfort, possible to every 
one of us, to so live lives of faith and obedience 
that in our last hour we are not obliged to leave 
our children to the mercies of a cold world, but 
can transfer our ownership to God, resting on his 
infinite and immutable promise that they shall 
be "beloved for the fathers' sake." Far better 
inheritance that for them, than houses and 
equipage, than bonds and stocks, than business 
and position. 

Beloved of God ! He who is that has nothing 
more for which he needs to ask. Let him only 
follow the leadings of that love, and all the 
gracious possibilities of life are within his reach, 
and afterward there is all heaven to come. How- 
ever much it is incumbent upon all to be religious, 
it is emphatically so in the case of those who are 
heads of households, for other interests than 
their personal welfare are at stake. They are 
solemnly bound to do their utmost for their 
children, and how can they discharge that re- 
sponsibility while by their indifference or un- 



144 BELOVED FOB THE FATHEBS' SAKE. 

belief they are standing between those children 
and the special and priceless privileges promised 
to those who are blessed with Christian parent- 
age? 

And neither must it be forgotten that since in 
the ordinance of our lives men are " beloved for 
the fathers' sake," there is a special responsibility 
resting upon those who as children enjoy or have 
enjoyed the religious nurture and spiritual ad- 
vantages of a Christian home. All the ordinary 
appeals of God through his Word and Spirit 
are made to them, every reason which comes 
with urgency to others to induce them to live 
lives of faith and obedience presses equally upon 
them, but over and above that is the argument and 
persuasion of the particular and sacred relation in 
which they stand to God. If they are among the 
" beloved for the fathers' sake," then for that love's 
sake and the fathers' sake, they have mighty cause 
to prove themselves worthy of those fathers and 
that love. Sons or daughters of Christian par- 
ents may have some special plan which they are 
bent upon carrying out, but it is not wise or 
right or safe to do it, if it would be a grief to 
the Christian parents who trained them and 
because of whom the gracious ministry of the 



BELOVED FOB THE FATHERS' SAKE. 145 

divine affection is busy in their behalf. It is 
doubly sinful for the young man or woman who 
came from a religious home to be selfish or 
reckless or irreligious in the conduct of life. 
The} r of all others are bound to be cautious, 
thoughtful, devout, consecrated in their purposes 
and actions. Their position has its special re- 
sponsibilities, which must not be forgotten or 
ignored. "Beloved for the fathers' sake," they 
must so use their advantage that they shall come 
to be beloved for their own sake, and by their 
own fidelity and piety become the occasion of 
like blessing to others who come after them. 

There is no class in the congregation for whom 
I feel profounder concern than irreligious heads 
of families. They occupy positions of command- 
ing influence. They are examples, lawgivers, 
rulers to their children. Their views of truth 
and duty are accepted as unquestionable. While 
they resist or reject or ignore religion, those who 
imitate them in every thing else follow them in 
this also. And so there are growing up among 
08 numbers of sturdy boys and fair girls, who 
are fast moving on toward active life with no 
God, no Christ, no faith, no care for religious 
things. In their frail boats they are heading 



146 BELOVED FOB THE FATIIEBS' SAKE. 

for the world's stormy sea, where the waves of 
sin are rolling and the wild winds of numberless 
temptations are all abroad. These fathers and 
mothers are painstaking and self-sacrificing, that 
their children may be well dressed and educated, 
and acquire good social positions and start well 
in business, but they lift no finger, make no sign, 
to help those children seek the kingdom of God 
and his righteousness. On the contrary, they 
throw the whole weight of their influence in 
the opposite scale, and by their personal unbelief 
or indifference virtually say to those children 
that religion is of no importance. Friends, how 
are those children to be reached by holy in- 
fluences which you know would work them 
infinite good? Not one of you but would feel 
safer about the future of your son and daughter 
if you knew that they were sincere Christians. 
And yet you are hindering it with the whole 
stress of your example. You send them to the 
Sabbath-school one hour in one day and keep 
them in the infidel school of your irreligious 
life all the rest of the week. Which instruction 
will be likely to make the most impression? 
You stand as an impenetrable wall between them 
and the truth of the gospel and the persuasions 



BELOVED FOB THE FATHERS' SAKE. 147 

of the divine Spirit. You deprive them of the 
covenant blessings of those who are "beloved 
for the fathers' sake." I say to you with infinite 
pity and yet with all plainness, that if you send 
those children out into the world without the 
protection which the grace of God and faith in 
the Lord Jesus Christ affords, and they come to 
wretchedness and wreck in consequence, you 
will be responsible for it. You may call these 
harsh words, but they are true words and you 
know it. Is there any thing stranger than that 
you should be willing to expend so much to 
provide your children with accomplishments, and 
so little to build up their character, and nothing 
at all to secure them a blessed immortality ? 

And the time in which many of us can exert 
gracious influences will soon be past. The chil- 
dren will be beyond our reach, shaping life for 
themselves. We ourselves shall be silent in the 
grave. How pressing the duty to be up and 
doing at once ! How God's command and paren- 
tal affection and the children's needs urge upon 
fathers and mothers here to begin the Christian 
life to-day, so that sons and daughters may come 
under the power of holy example and instruction, 
and come into the privileges of those who are 



148 BELOVED FOB THE FATHEBS' SAKE. 

" beloved for the fathers' sake," and that parents 
and children may all be gathered into the Redeem- 
er's blessed fold, and enter, an unbroken family, 
into the life and joy of heaven. 



VIII. 



VIII. 

THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSAGE. 

"And God said unto Moses, . . . Thus shalt thou say unto 
the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." — 
Exodus 3: 14. 

T I ^HESE words are at once the essence and 
-*- the climax of the training which Moses 
received to prepare him to become a minister and 
teacher of God's ancient people. It is true that 
the processes of his education for that office were 
many and complex. His experience was a mar- 
velous one, and marvelously instructive. His 
reed cradle rocked on the currents of the Nile, 
the sound of whose soft-going waters was his in- 
fant lullaby ; his transference as an adopted child 
to the palace of the Pharaohs ; his boyhood and 
early manhood passed among the splendors of 
the court ; his religious feeling nursed and de- 
veloped under the pressure of the solemn mys- 
teries of the superstitions of Egypt; his banish- 
ment from the royal presence ; his growing sense 
of the outrage and cruelty inflicted upon his 
fellow-countrymen, for whom there seemed to be 

151 



152 THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSAGE. 

no helper in heaven or earth ; the desert solitudes 
in which he passed his exile, the silent clouds 
and his voiceless flocks his only society, forcing 
him to keep company with his own thoughts, 
great Horeb towering up over his head, a wonder 
by day and a gloom by night, — how all these ex- 
periences and memories and surroundings must 
have wrought to create a grand type of character 
and make him a man of power ! Such environ- 
ments inevitably gender force. When nature and 
society and dramatic experiences combine to shape 
a human life, it is impossible for it to be common- 
place. 

But these agencies, effective as they are, were 
not sufficient to fashion the Hebrew leader to the 
divine ideal. Some revelation from the invisible 
world must be made to him, that he might com- 
prehend the sublimity and divinity of his mission. 
Some supernatural element of force must be added 
to energy of character. Some inspiration must 
be supplied other than that caught from circum- 
stances and surroundings. And so God kindles 
the glory of his presence in the flaming bush of 
Horeb, and out of the fire Moses hears a voice 
defining his mission and investing him with au- 
thority. All the antecedent experiences of his 



TEE MESSENGER AXD THE MESSAGE. 153 

life had done necessary preparatory work, but 
now and here he receives his commission and his 
anointing. He is to attempt this work not simply 
or chiefly because he has been trained into fitness 
for it, but because God has called him. He is to 
succeed in it, not merely because he is elect among 
men in breadth of culture, but mostly because I 
AM has sent him. It is the fact that God is 
with him and God is using him that gives him 
confidence and gives other men confidence in him. 
The revelation of Horeb is the last and completing 
stroke in the long process of shaping. The flame 
and the voice are the potent agencies that trans- 
figure and weld into one all previous forces at 
work, and transform the Hebrew herdsman into a 
fit and -mighty messenger to sorrowing and captive 
Israel. 

There are many modern theories as to what is 
essential to the effectiveness of the modern ministry. 
Pulpit success is a complexity of threads and colors. 
That a warp of piety is indispensable no serious 
man questions ; but given that, how much mare 
is considered to be integral in the make-up of a 
preacher who can command the car of the public ! 
He must be a scholar, familiar with all the conti- 
nents of thought; a traveler, acquainted with the 



154 THE MESSENGEB AND THE MESSAGE. 

classic lands of old knowledge ; an explorer, hunt- 
ing for new realms of truth, bringing from both 
old and new the things which will inspire men 
with interest. He must be a thinker, his brain 
creative, able to build chaos into order, to make 
something out of nothing, and on occasion to 
make nothing out of something ; his mind a busy 
laboratory, where solution and distillation and 
combination and crystallization of ideas, and all 
the varied processes of intellectual chemistry go 
on briskly and continuously. He must be ready 
of speech, having the trick or skill to put thought 
into comely phrase that is sweet in sound, attrac- 
tive in dress, flaming in intensity. He must be 
versatile so that there will be variety in his 
thoughts and words, so that he will be elastic 
in adapting himself and his speech to the shifting 
moods of the humanity he addresses. He must 
combine in his single personality the elements of 
eminence in many different callings, and combine 
them in such proportionate measure that he shall 
escape the imputation of being unbalanced and 
erratic. If the ideal of the aggregate opinion 
on the matter is the true one, the preacher who 
aspires to power in his work, in our time, for a 
different reason but with equal earnestness, like 



THE 1IESSENGEB AXD THE MESSAGE. 155 

the great apostle, may voice his difficulties in the 
cry : " Who is sufficient for these things ? " 

That all these items of equipment enumerated 
are of value and have their use is undeniably true, 
and yet their relative importance is likely to be 
exaggerated. Of supreme moment to men in 
other positions, they are only subordinately essen- 
tial to the preacher of the gospel. His work lies 
apart from all other human callings, and success 
in his work is something special, different in liber, 
and unlike in character to all other achievements 
which men call success. There have been great 
scholars who as Christian ministers have been 
great failures. There have been profound Chris- 
tian thinkers who, with all their researches, have 
somehow missed the high road to men's hearts. 
There have been brilliant Christian orators, masters 
of ornate and fervid speech, who have built their 
utterances into massive arguments, and illumined 
them with the splendors of imagination, and beau- 
tified them with all the graces of an opulent 
rhetoric, and the world has flocked to hear them, 
and the world has sat and listened to them with 
admiration, and the world has gone away un- 
changed, as hard and selfish and wicked as it 
came. These qualities and attainments, so indis- 



156 THE MESSENGEB AXD THE MESSAGE. 

pensable and so infallible in securing eminence in 
other directions, are relatively impotent and insig- 
nificant in the work of the Christian ministry, be- 
cause that work is unique in its character, special 
in its ends, apart and alone in the conditions that 
determine its successful prosecution. All these 
qualities and attainments have their helpful use, 
but they are not the invincible' forces, the quicken- 
ing life, the transfiguring flame of that proclama- 
tion of the gospel which makes it " the wisdom of 
God and the power of God unto salvation." 

The truth is, and the quicker and more clearly 
we recognize it the better, the truth is, that in 
these days the innermost secret of effective preach- 
ing is being too largely buried out of sight. The 
endeavor of our age is to reduce every thing to a 
science, to discover in the working of natural laws 
a solution of all difficulties, and to find in the 
proper arrangement and use of natural conditions 
all the force which men need to make them victo- 
rious in whatever they undertake. But a really 
successful ministry of the gospel can not be 
reached within those limitations. There is a 
wider area from which inspiration must be drawn; 
another and mightier force to be utilized. The 
supernatural element in preaching is the thing of 



THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSAGE. 157 

most account. Moses has had more influence 
over the world than Plato, though Plato was pos- 
sibly the wiser of the two ; or than Aristotle, 
though Aristotle was the profounder thinker of 
the two ; or than Demosthenes, though Demos- 
thenes was the greater orator of the two, because, 
while these men had all the furnishing that native 
talent and the broadest human culture could give 
them, they had only that ; while Moses drew his 
chief inspiration direct from God, and his human 
deficiency was supplemented by the exhaustless 
energies of Almightiness. And that way always 
lies the highest power over men. One word that 
unmistakably comes out of the great, silent, spirit- 
ual world about us and above us outweighs in 
force all human argument and eloquence ; one 
flash of radiance from the immediate divine pres- 
ence is more revealing than the flickering aurora 
of the most brilliant speculation, or the dim 
twilight of the conclusions of the schools. It 
was not Moses learned in all the wisdom of 
the Egyptians, but Moses going on his errand 
because " I am had sent him," who got audience 
of the people ; not Moses with his diplomacy 
and strategy, but Moses with God at his side, 
attesting his presence with signs and wonders, 



158 THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSAGE. 

who led Israel out of captivity and into the 
promised land. 

And the ministry of our times errs greatly and 
loses greatly if it fails to make high account of 
the fact, not that it has but that it is of divine 
authority. Every man who has a right to stand 
up in the pulpit and preach the gospel holds a 
divine commission, not technically or by some 
trick of words, but actually and absolutely. It 
is nothing against the integrity of this claim that 
the preacher has had no precise and definable call 
to his office in the form of some striking and un- 
usual manifestation of the divine will. The slow, 
subtle shapings and leadings of providence are 
quite as miraculous as some sudden wonder that 
flames a moment and is gone. 

Analyze the history of any true Christian 
minister and you find that his life has been full 
of significant experiences and events. The ave- 
nues to other employments have been mysteriously 
closed against him. Worldly ambitions have been 
chastened. The spiritual needs of men have 
pressed closer and harder upon him. In visions 
by night, out of the Macedonia of dreams, voices 
have drifted to his ears with their pleading, 
"Come over and help us." Disappointments and 



THE MESSENGER AXD THE MESSAGE. 159 

sorrows have been allotted to him, and often in 
the desert solitudes of his grief and trials he has 
seen the burning bush flaming with the presence 
of God. The worth and power of the gospel has 
grown upon him until it has come to be the price- 
less and invincible word of divine truth. All 
events and experiences have worked together to 
bid him be a minister of Jesus Christ, and forbid 
him to be any thing else. And that is a divine 
call and commission. 

We confuse the truth by our misleading phrase- 
ology. Men talk about the profession of the 
ministry. The ministry is not a profession, it is 
an office ; and those who rightfully occupy it are 
divinely elected and appointed to it. A right 
understanding of his office is essential to the 
minister. It makes him conscientious, watchful, 
and careful, i; that he may please Him who has 
chosen him." It rives him confidence. The word 

o 

which he speaks lie speaks not of himself. It 
stimulates his courage, and he utters his message 
" whether men will hear or whether they will for- 
bear ; " whether the truth be edged with the sha] p- 
ness of the sword, or burning with the intensity 
of white heat, or redolent with the dew and bloom 
of Carmel and Sharon. It undergirds him with 



160 THE MESSENGER AXD THE MESSAGE. 

support, and in the presence of obloquy and op- 
position and persecution " none of these things 
move him, neither is life counted dear, if he may 
finish his course and the ministry which he has 
received from the Lord Jesus." And in all this 
there is no tinge of personal conceit or assumption 
of personal superiority. The organ that under 
the touch of the master opens its multitudinous 
mouths and pours forth its flood of consenting 
and conflicting chords and discords, whose waves 
surge through nave and chancel and choir, and 
break and die away in sweetness among the high- 
groined arches, may not claim the merit of the 
music, for to-morrow, under the handling of some 
crude amateur, it may pipe as meanly and shrilly 
as the boy's toy whistle. The minister can claim 
nothing ; he is insignificant, only a man ; the 
ministry can not claim too much ; it is a sovereign 
office, ordained of God. 

This specialty of the ministerial office, which its 
occupant needs to recognize for his own sake, he 
is bound to assert for the world's sake. " I AM 
has sent him," and he must not be reticent 
or diffident about proclaiming the fact. To make 
men feel that is the secret and essential of his suc- 
cess. Tt is impossible to weight that point with 



THE MESSENGER AXD THE 31ESSAGE. 161 

too much emphasis. If a preacher expects to 
compel attention and secure conviction among his 
hearers by sheer force of intellectual ability, or 
power of thought, or heat of earnestness, or fasci- 
nation of style, he grossly miscalculates. His 
supreme effort ought to be to stand in the pulpit 
as the acknowledged representative of God, and 
so to hide himself that the people see and listen 
to God, not him. The apostolic canon has never 
been abrogated or bettered : " Now then we are 
ambassadors for Christ, as though God did be- 
seech you by us : we pray you in Christ's stead, 
be ye reconciled to God. ? ' 

Is it an untenable theory that the decay of the 
influence of the pulpit in these days that are upon 
as is largely due to the contempt or neglect into 
which this idea of the divine appointment of the 
ministry has fallen ? That there has been such a 
wave of influence can not fairly be denied. It is 
true there are ecclesiastical mathematicians who 
collate their statistics of church growth, and when 
we look at their tabulated figures we see their 
side of the matter, but when we look at our con- 
gregations and communities we see another and 
equally well proven side. And numerical attend- 
ance upon public worship is not the only signifi- 



162 THE MESSENGEB AND THE MESSAGE. 

cant factor. There is a lowering of the tone of 
the public thought in its estimate of the work of 
the ministry which admits of but one interpreta- 
tion. " Why," asks a writer in The London Times, 
" why this preaching? Why does this man talk 
to us? Who is he that he should talk? Minis- 
ters are simple nuisances." A caustic critic in one 
of the most popular American periodicals brusquely 
says : " Reading men know where to find better 
reading than can possibly be furnished by any 
man who is bound to write two or even one ser- 
mon a week ; and to train a corps of young men 
in the expectation that any considerable fraction 
of them will be able to win and maintain a com- 
manding influence in their parishes by their dis- 
courses, is to do them the greatest injury, by 
cherishing expectations which never can be real- 
ized." These may be called extreme utterances, 
but they are directly in the line of a large drift 
of popular sentiment. The fact is, the preaching 
of the gospel has been secularized in the common 
thought about it. It is a mere human proceeding, 
has no authority except such as attaches to its 
inherent ability, has no special importance beyond 
the fact that it aims somewhat higher than the 
lyceum or the political address. The divine war- 



THE MESSENGEB AND THE MESSAGE. 163 

rant for it and the divine element in it are utterly 
ignored. The one characteristic that isolates it 
and gives it its sacred efficiency is denied, and 
never until ministers preach under the inspiration 
of the knowledge that they are divinely commis- 
sioned messengers, and men admit that their com- 
mission is divine, can the Christian pulpit occupy 
its true place and exhibit its true power in the 
community. 

It is easy to see how this theory of the ministe- 
rial office defines and limits the work of a minister. 
If a man is a divine messenger, then he has no 
concern with any thing but the message he is ap- 
pointed to deliver. If " I am " has sent him, 
then he is to utter only the words which he is 
commanded to speak. That limitation rules out 
at once a vast amount of what passes for preach- 
ing. How much that is called preaching is simply 
thinking and speaking along lines of human spec- 
ulation ! He tells the people what he thinks 
about the message, and wherein the message is 
faulty, and how the message can be bettered. No 
wonder such discourse as that proves ineffective. 
It may please the ear or excite the curiosity or 
gratify the taste, but it has no power over the 
heart. It has no lightnings to burn the air clear 



164 THE MESSENGEB AND THE MESSAGE. 

of moral miasma, no revelation to make to men 
groping in darkness, no sovereign command to 
proclaim that is supreme enough to marshal 
human lawlessness into obedience. No medicine 
for soul sickness, no splendor of promise to trans- 
figure the murk and gloom of life with the glory 
of faith and hope. It is simply the mist that rises 
from the shallow, and often stagnant, pools of 
human speculation, unsubstantial, evanescent, its 
influence for evil greater than its power for 
good. 

The preacher who is conscious of his divine 
calling as a messenger of God is expected to 
have faith in the message. Without the prepa- 
ration and inspiration that comes from actual 
commerce with the truth, preaching is perfunctory 
and cold. There should be no mistake nor loose 
thinking on this point. The cultivation of per- 
sonal faith in the truth is a prerequisite to a 
powerful proclamation of the truth. God in 
these last days builds no Sinais on which lie 
descends in visible glory to give his law. He 
sends his truth through human experiences, and 
so out of human lips ; and the faith of the man 
by whom he sends is essential to quick receptivity 
and accurate transmission of the message. The 



THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSAGE. 165 

index needle used in ocean telegraphy is so highly 
charged with magnetic force that it sways and 
swings under the impulse of the most attenuated 
electric current, and in your child's thimble can 
be generated battery power sufficient to report 
the conclusions of parliaments or the gossip of 
the streets on the other side of the Atlantic. It 
is the soul made receptive and responsive by im- 
plicit faith that catches and passes on the lightest 
whisper and the loudest thunder from the great 
continents the other side the sea, that parts the 
world of sense from the world of spirit. 

It is therefore a misfortune and an impediment 
that any of the ministry of our time are in a state 
of mental incertitude, their most positive belief 
the belief that they are not sure what they believe. 
This age requires affirmative preaching based on 
definite convictions. It may seem to argue hu- 
mility for a man to be vague in his acceptance 
and utterance of doctrine, but that mood, whether 
baseborn or well begotten, can compass nothing 
but inefficiency. Thistledown in the pulpit can 
not preach convincingly to positivism in the 
pews, nor breast for a moment the whirlwind of 
speculative skepticism that is storming through 
the land. The great truths of God are knowable. 



166 THE MESSENGEB AND THE MESSAGE. 

Inspiration, atonement, moral law, the certitudes 
of the hereafter, — these things are in and of the 
very fiber of revelation, and they assert themselves 
in verse and chapter and book and volume, as the 
patterns wrought in thread of gold glow on the 
surface of royal tapestry. If a man has not made 
up his mind about them, his place is in the school 
studying first principles, not in the pulpit dispens- 
ing platitudes and parentheses. Uncertain faith 
in the preacher means certain unfaith in the 
hearer. It is not on sciolists and dreamers that 
the tongues of flame descend and rest. It is 
knowledge of the truth, out of which to speak 
the truth, that transfigures men, making them 
flaming apostles and. sending them on their tri- 
umphant mission. An unbelieving ministry is 
limp and impotent, an offence to God, a curse to 
the Church, and a laughing-stock to the world. 
But if the preacher who brings the message must 
believe the message in order to deliver it aright, 
so must the people who hear it, in order to receive 
it aright. If the word that is brought to a con- 
gregation Sabbath by Sabbath is acknowledged 
by them to be the Word of the Lord, that simple 
recognition removes numberless obstacles from its 
road of access to the heart. All human accidents 



THE MESSENGER AXD THE MESSAGE. 167 

of style, vehicle, method, manner, become matters 
indifferent. Earthen pitcher or golden flagon, 
what do we care in which it is brought if we may 
put to our lips the draught from the river of God? 
Rough John the Baptist, with raiment of camel's 
hair and a leathern girdle about his loins, has 
polish enough for us if he only brings us the 
Word of the Lord. What vast changes would 
be wrought if men only grasped the absolute truth 
that every gospel sermon is a direct divine com- 
munication ! What a hush would come over re- 
ligious assemblies ! What an awe would be on all 
faces ! What holy reverence in all hearts ! How 
these churches of ours would lose their common- 
ness and change to sacred places, becoming in 
turn Horebs of revelation, and Hermons of trans- 
figuration, and Pisgahs of outlook, from whose 
summits we caught the gleam of the fair city 
of God ! How all our base, bad, petty, selfish, 
worldly estimates and prejudices that steel the 
heart against the truth would be swept away, 
and men would wait with breathless eagerness to 
know what God the Lord had to say to them! 
Preaching will never be the sublime reality, the 
almost omnipotent force it was designed to be, 
until the minister is sure and the people are sure 



168 THE MESSENGEB AND THE MESSAGE. 

that by it and through it, it is God himself who 
speaks. 

Manifestly, therefore, the preacher is not at 
liberty to abridge or alter his message. He is 
to deliver it just as it is and all that it is ; and 
this restriction holds good in regard to quality as 
well as quantity. If he has no right to drop out 
from Scripture chapter or verse, neither has he 
a right in the name of criticism to omit from verse 
or chapter their evident meaning. If he has no 
right to substitute a sentence of his own for a pas- 
sage of inspiration, neither has he a right to put a 
sentiment of his own in the place of the mind of 
the Spirit. The dilution of doctrine and the de- 
nial of doctrine are grades of the same error. The 
gospel is an assemblage of truths, all of which 
and the whole of which need to be known. There 
is no superfluity of revelation. There are no 
teachings designed to test men's ingenuity in 
interpretation. The New Testament is not a 
camping-ground for intellectual sluggards, but 
neither is it a hunting-ground where the Nimrods 
of criticism may exhibit their marksmanship. 
The gospel is a compend of practical truth. Its 
contents are fitted to every condition of human 
experience. It has warning for the sinner, en- 



THE MESSENGER AXD THE MESSAGE. 169 

couragement for the struggling, light for the 
sorrowing, hope for the lost. It has a promise 
for the cradle and an assurance for the death- 
bed ; a lesson for the home, the farm, the shop, 
the factory, the sanctuary. Men all need it, and 
they need all of it. Jesus pronounced a woe 
upon him who " should break one of these least 
commandments ; " is it a lighter offence to ignore 
or endeavor to break the force of one least teach- 
ing of revelation ? There need be no mistake in 
this matter, and no difficulty in determining the 
methods and limits of legitimate investigation. 
The conservatism that pleads for caution in the 
handling of Scripture is the conservatism of 
proper reverence, not bondage to old forms of 
interpretation. There is sometimes a recklessness 
which in the name of scholarship undertakes dis- 
honest and dangerous work. It grows out of a 
misconception of the substance and character of 
the Word of God. It seems a harmless change 
of phrase to say that the Bible contains a revela- 
tion, instead of asserting that it is a revelation. 
And yet, practically, that slight difference in 
statement eventuates in a wide divergence of 
methods and conclusions. If the Holy Word 
only contains a revelation, then who constitute 



170 THE MESSENGER AXD THE MESSAGE. 

the high court of judicature to determine what 
that revelation is ? The settlement of the ques- 
tion inevitably reverts to individual opinion. One 
man has the same right as another to investigate 
and decide, and one man investigates with caution 
and another with dynamite, and what becomes of 
the message ? Some of the results of this much- 
lauded method of individualism justify the demand 
of the man who called for a copy of the reversed 
New Testament. It is the preacher's responsibility 
to maintain the integrity of the divine Word, and 
give to men, not the message which it contains, 
but the message which it is. Holy Scripture is 
not a transport wagon laden with truths precious 
and teachings indifferent, and the preacher a man 
authorized to sort the jDackages and decide which 
shall be delivered and which withheld. Holy 
Scripture is the chariot of the Lord of hosts, 
the form of the Son of man riding serene and 
sovereign in its triumphal car, all parts and par- 
ticulars of it instinct with august svmbolism : his- 
tory and psalm and prophecy and epistle and Apoc- 
alypse, out of whose agreement it is builded, 
each some separate shade of the one and sufficient 
revelation of God. What God has joined together 
who shall put asunder ? What God has honored 



THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSAGE. 171 

in its entirety who shall presume to criticize in 
particulars ? Blazoned all over with the ineffable 
name, who dares erase a single stroke of the divine 
hand? or distort or diminish the significance of 
the smallest letter of inspiration? The preacher 
is about perilous business who brings to men 
another message or a lesser message than the 
glorious gospel of the blessed God. 

And how all that has been said grows august 
and edges itself with keenness when we consider 
God's intent in commissioning his messengers, and 
the meaning and power of the message with which 
he entrusts them. This gospel to be preached is 
the Word of life and hope to a lost world. 
Smother the truth in what smooth phrase you 
please, hide it for the moment with some passing 
pageant of material prosperity, and still the fact 
remains that this is a lost world, and men left to 
themselves are helpless and hopeless. A traveler 
has told us that there is a cliff overhanging a 
Mediterranean city, where if one stands he hears 
all sounds below him rising and blending in a 
minor chord. The outlook is bright and inspirit- 
ing. The azure of the sea melts into the azure 
of the horizon. The vineyards green the slopes 
of the surrounding hills. The softness of Italian 



172 THE MESSENGEB AND THE MESSAGE, 

color is in the sky. Palace and cottage gleam 
whitely through the unobscuring air. All that 
meets the eye is a dream of beauty. But the 
voice, the articulation of the human . life below, 
is a wail. The children's laughter, the hum of 
trade, the lap of the waves on the beach, the music 
of festival processions, — all come up to the listen- 
er's ear set on the key of a Miserere. There 
are points of view from which this world seems 
a wonder and a delight. The march of its indus- 
trial enterprise, its advance in knowledge, its 
growing mastery over the subtlest forces of na- 
ture, its distances annihilated, its wildernesses 
reclaimed, its deserts transformed to gardens, — 
all these sights beget the illusion that it is well 
with the world. 

But there are heights of moral discernment 
where God sits always, and to which some men 
climb, where, in spite of the beauty that meets the 
eye, the ear hears the true voice of human life, as 
it moans and sobs in the agony of its apartness 
from God. The air is full of sounds — the thunder 
of the mills, the clink of gold, the laughter of 
careless pleasure, the dreamy music of the dance 
— but stand where all voices blend into one, and 
you hear not a psean of victory, but a prayer for 



THE MESSENGEB AXD TEE MESSAGE. 173 

mercy. This is a lost world, and it is solely be- 
cause it is a lost world that the divine messenger 
and the divine message are sent, that men may be 
led to such a knowledge of Christ crucified that 
he shall become to them ;i the wisdom of God and 
the power of God unto salvation." And as we 
stand face to face to-day with these truths, and 
recognize them as truths, I think that there must 
come to some of us, if not to all of us, the feeling 
that we have misunderstood and underrated this 
service of public worship in which Sabbath by 
Sabbath we engage. 

We have been in the habit of considering the 
preachers to whom we have listened as merely 
men, and have forgotten that they were messen- 
gers. We have judged the preaching which we 
have heard by the canons of ordinary criticism, 
instead of being solely concerned to know whether 
it was the Word of God. So we have made small 
reasons sufficient excuse for being absent, and 
have been apathetic when we were present, and 
so have iron-plated ourselves against the convic- 
tions and persuasions and quickening which other- 
wise would have come to us from the preaching of 
the gospel. Is it not time to cry halt ! to this 
under-estimate and misuse of God's chosen instru- 



174 THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSAGE. 

mentality for the conversion of the world ? Going 
to church is dull business ! Yes, if you go to hear 
what a man has to say, but not if you go to hear 
what God has to say. Preaching, as a rule, is 
stupid ! Yes, often, if you judge it as you do the 
lecture or the oration, by its style and imagery 
and humor and novelty ; but not if you are hungry 
to know divine truth and eager to receive with 
meekness the ingrafted word that is able to save 
your souls. May God so open our minds and 
hearts that when we come into this church it 
may be the preacher's ambition to speak, and the 
people's wish and hope to hear, not platitudes, or 
brilliancies, or philosophies, or human ingenuities 
of thought and phrase ; but the simple message of 
the gospel, the minister the mouthpiece, his utter- 
ances the words of Jesus Christ, the people caring 
for nothing so much as to hear the voice of the 
Lord. And then the splendor of the divine pres- 
ence will be here, and souls be awake and elate, 
and the Lord make bare his arm, and his hand 
stretch out to us the scepter of salvation, and the 
church be to every one of us the home of God and 
the gate of heaven. 



IX. 
<0ioty ana Beauty 



IX. 

GLORY AND BEAUTY. 1 

"And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother 
for glory and for beauty. And thou shalt speak unto all that 
are wise hearted* whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, 
that they make Aaron's garments to consecrate him, that he may 
minister unto me in the priesVs office." —Exodus 28: 2, 3. 

RELIGION always has held and always must 
hold a peculiar and solitary position among 
the forces operative in society. Its functions are 
unique, and therefore its adaptations and methods 
are logically held to be unique also. Any right 
conception of it starts with the recognition of its 
supernatural origin, and that specialty of its con- 
stitution removes it from the ordinary sphere of 
ethical and scientific criticism. It is not to be 
judged as we judge of a system or a theory or 
a philosophy, which is the result of a purely 
human discovery or construction. The measuring 
lines with which we determine the compass of 
religion and the balances in which we weigh its 
value must be more delicate and accurate than 
those with which we test the generalizations from 

1 Preached before the Massachusetts Convention of Congregational 
Ministers, 1S85. 

177 



178 GLOBY AND BEAUTY. 

experiment, or the final " therefores " of a syllo- 
gism. The theodolite and the chain are of no 
use in the survey of the kingdom of God. We 
must insist upon this solitariness of religion both 
in position and substance, and demand that the 
criticisms upon it be genuine, adequate, equitable, 
and within the limits prescribed by the nature of 
the case. 

The utter neglect of this canon makes room for 
the many and too generally accepted strictures 
upon Old Testament religion. On the face of it 
there is pertinence in the criticisms which a mod- 
ern school of loose thinkers pass upon the minute- 
ness and apparent triviality of the requirements 
of the Pentateuch. On our plane of thought it 
seems a belittling of God to represent him as 
prescribing the number and form of a man's ablu- 
tions, the food he is to eat, the postures he is to 
assume, the cut and color of the garments he is to 
wear. The higher spiritual conceptions of deity 
which obtain in modern times disgust us with the 
apparent materialism of the ancient cultus. It is 
hard for us to see any thing commendable or desir- 
able in slain beasts and smoking altars, and bel- 
lowing trumpets and clouds of incense, and robes 
of purple and scarlet. Our faith in the teaching 



GLOBY AND BEAUTY. 179 

of Jesus that " God is a spirit, and they that wor- 
ship him must worship him in spirit and in truth," 
prejudices us against all opposing practice, and 
unfits us for any fair judicial estimate of the 
worth and significance of older and cruder forms. 
And so some hold with Theodore Parker that the 
Old Testament is u a bloody old book," while 
others, and they are many, contend that the gross- 
nesses and puerilities of its prescriptions vacate its 
claim to be a word of God, and they summarily 
consign it with Vedas and Institutes of Menu and 
Book of Mormon to the limbo of superstitious 
fraud and exploded falsehood. 

But Judaism, like every other religion, was a 
system by itself, and must be criticized under that 
limitation, and under the still further limitation of 
its historic date and the condition of the people 
for whom it was appointed. The question is not 
what position Judaism would occupy in the civili- 
zation of to-day, but what was its place and value 
in the earlier time. It is not competent to exam- 
ine the Mosaic age with the nineteenth century 
microscope. We are, to borrow a phrase from 
science, to find out how it " harmonized with its 
environment," and bearing that restriction in 
mind we rule out a great deal that arrogates to 
itself the title of the higher criticism. 



180 GLOBY AND BEAUTY. 

The function of the Jewish religion was limited. 
In the nature of the case it was initial and alpha- 
betic. It was God's first formulated utterance 
respecting himself, his claims, and the duties 
which men owed him. There had been previous 
knowledge of him, but it was vague, atmospheric, 
insufficient. From the beginning the heavens 
had declared the glory of God and the firmament 
showed his handiwork, but men wildly misread 
the teachings of nature. There had always been 
evidence of law, and a ruler behind the law, but 
the interpretation of providence had varied with 
the temperament and circumstances of those who 
studied it. The ante-Mosaic religion as we know 
it was an incoherent, always shifting congeries of 
beliefs and practices. The first purpose of Juda- 
ism was to secure definiteness, to furnish men with 
a center of faith and a law of conduct, to crystal- 
lize vagrant and conflicting speculations into a 
system which should be recognized as authority. 
And this system was to be adapted to society in 
its simplest form. The Jews in Moses' time were 
a nation of children. As a mass, they were igno- 
rant, intellectually narrow, insensitive to pure 
truth. Their education was necessarily the edu- 
cation of children, the instruction of the picture- 



GLORY AXD BEAUTY. 181 

book, the object-lesson, the event : entrance to 
mind and heart forced through the avenue of the 
senses. The alphabetic religion of people under 
those conditions must inevitably be a religion of 
forms and ceremonies, and minute prescriptions 
and absolute requirements. The men of that day 
had no experience in processes of thought, and 
they were spared the thinking of which they were 
not capable by the abrupt and final " Thou 
shalt " and " Thou shalt not " of the command- 
ment. They had no conception of pure spiritual 
truth; but the altar, the streaming blood, the 
smoking sacrifice, the gorgeous vestments, ap- 
pealed to the dull apprehension and inspired the 
desire, while it prepared the way for the recogni- 
tion and reception of the divine teachings of 
which these things were the significant symbols. 
The Old Testament as the last word of God to 
men would be insufficient; as the first word it is 
adequate and wonderful. The alphabet is as 
admirable in its way as the poem or the history 
into which human thought arranges it. Judaism 
as a finality in religion would mock men with its 
insufficiency, but Judaism as the Genesis of the 
revelation of God to man is the seal and pro- 
phecy of the Apocalypse, the streak of morning 



182 GLOBY AXD BEAUTY. 

dawn that foreruns and draws after it the splen- 
dors of millennial noon. 

Among the mass of these ancient symbolic 
teachings, perhaps no one is of more signal and 
practical importance than that conveyed in the 
words under consideration. " And thou shalt 
make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, for 
glory and for beauty." The ancient priesthood in 
many particulars occupied the place and fulfilled 
the same office as the modern creed. We formu- 
late our faith in language ; to the Jew the priest 
was the word of doctrine made flesh and dwelling 
among them. That position of the priesthood 
was in part the result of divine ordinance, and in 
part inevitable in a rude age. To whatever it was 
due, it necessitated extreme care in the equipment 
of those who occupied the high station. In the 
popular estimate, the man who filled the office 
was lost sight of in the splendor of the office 
itself. Aaron as a man might not be above the 
level of other men, but Aaron as priest stood as 
near to God as he did to humanity in the people's 
thought about him. It was on that side on which 
he was supposed to represent that divine thought 
that he would be most closely watched, and for 
religious purposes it was supremely important that 



GLORY AND BEAUTY. 183 

every thing on that side should be elaborate, 
impressive, and significant of truth. The index 
hands of the clock are insignificant bits of brass 
or iron, of no finer grain or higher value than the 
metal that enters into the construction of the 
mechanism of the factory or the utensils of the 
kitchen, but when they are placed on the dial to 
tell how far this spinning globe has rolled through 
the courses of the day, they must be adjusted to 
cunning wheelwork with nicest care and take on 
authority, as expressive of the progress of the 
mighty dynamics of nature which bring the dark- 
ness and the light in due season, the evening and 
the morning in their appointed place. Aaron as 
man might be left to eat and drink and clothe him- 
self after the fashion of ordinary humanity ; but 
Aaron as minister in the holy office, Aaron as the 
index hand of Deity, must have every item of 
appearance and behavior prescribed for him. His 
individuality was for the time effaced. He looked 
and spoke and acted according as lie was wrought 
upon by the unseen, silent God, who through him 
communicated to men a knowledge of himself 
and of his will by vestment and posture, and elect 
and consecrated humanity. 

" And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron 



184 GLORY AND BEAUTY. 

thy brother, for glory and for beauty." These 
were the two elements that were emphasized as 
characteristic of true religion. They were novel 
elements in religion. The pre-Mosaic faiths, so 
far as their nature can be determined by the dim 
glimpses of them to which we are limited, were a 
compound of force and sensualism. To be afraid 
of God and to give reins to loose living, that is 
the ordinary type of religion unwrought upon by 
revelation. Modern naturalism which rejects rev- 
elation may protest against that definition, but 
modern naturalism unconsciously and in spite of 
itself has been so permeated and transfigured by 
the influence of revelation that it can not be 
accepted as a type. The Jews had been schooled 
in the oppressive superstitions of Egypt, a land 
that evidenced its worship of force in the colossal 
temples and giant statues that occupied the holy 
places ; that evidenced its worship of the sensual 
by the orgies of its sacred mysteries. Even God 
himself got his first slight hold upon the attention 
of the people by the miraculous plagues that 
proved him a God of power. Glory and beauty, 
at least in their deeper ethical and spiritual mean- 
ing, were ideas that had not yet merged into 
the light. The people had neither the appetency 



GLORY AND BEAUTY, 185 

nor the capacity for them. It seemed a far-away 
beginning of instruction in regard to them, this 
use of color and glitter that simply smote the eye 
and impressed the senses ; very rudimentary char- 
acters these purple and scarlet and jeweled robes, 
by means of which and up from which to spell the 
way to virtue and kindness and devotion and faith, 
which are the perfected splendors, the true glory 
and beauty of religion. And yet at whatever 
cost and however slowly, those two ideas must be 
ingrained in the conception of men as essential to 
the service which they are to render to God and 
in his name to humanity. 

In the course of God's progressive revelation of 
himself and his truth to men, forms change but 
facts remain. The world long ago outgrew its 
need of the ordinances and prescriptions of Juda- 
ism. When Christ came he swept away with an 
unsparing hand symbols and rites that once had 
their most sacred significance and use. But yet 
so far as essentials are concerned, he taught no 
new religion. The truth as it is in Jesus is only 
the truth as it was in Moses, grown up. The 
priesthood of Christ is the completion of the 
priesthood of Aaron. All the deep interior spir- 
itual postulates of the old dispensation are re- 



186 GLOBY AND BEAUTY. 

affirmed in the new. The work which the ancient 
economy was organized to accomplish, the mod- 
ern is required to continue. Glory and beauty 
are still and always essentials of true religion. A 
primitive age is not the only age that needs to be 
served with these credentials that a system is from 
God and therefore authoritative. In our times 
preeminently a religion that aspires to control the 
faith and shape the life must attest both its right 
and power to undertake that high work by the 
glory of evident Deity in it and back of it and 
reaching through it, and by a beauty of spirit and 
method and fitness which when clearly under- 
stood will draw all men to it. Glory and beauty ; 
if our modern religion lacks these, no stringent 
orthodoxy of creed and confession, no traceable 
lineage back to fire-crowned apostles, no perfec- 
tion of ecclesiastical organization, no wonder of 
religious architecture, no stateliness of ritual, no 
unanimous shout of a church constituency, " The 
temple of the Lord are we," — no one of these 
things or all together will make good the deficiency. 
Glory and beauty, these must glow on the surface 
and flame at the center of any faith that attempts 
with the least prospect of success to stand before 
men as the acknowledged representative of the 
will and word of God. 



GLOBT AND BEAUTY. 187 

Judaism was set to do its work in this direction 
under special limitations which have expired, but 
Christianity does not find an absolutely clear 
field before it. The modern faith is in part 
at least the outcome of all that preceded it, 
a system which gathers up into itself whatever 
religious truths have been discovered and adjusts 
them each to each in a harmonious whole. And 
in proportion as a system grows complex, it be- 
comes difficult to administer. To propel a canoe 
with the paddle is simpler work than to manage 
the intricate wheelwork of the engines that drive 
the steamship. It is easier to teach the alphabet 
than to give instruction in the higher mathemat- 
ics. It was far less strain to fashion the gar- 
ments of the priesthood after a prescribed pattern 
than it is to so administer Christianity that it dis- 
closes its full significance and stands in the thought 
of men for all that it is worth. And what is more, 
the modern faith lias to do with highly organized 
society, with its variety of needs, its multitude of 
problems, its shifting moods, its motley phases of 
population, its strata of classes, its turbulent rest- 
lessness, its infinite, constant, and often unreason- 
able demands. To so apprehend religion, and so 
formulate it, and so administer it, that its glory 



188 GLOliY AND BEAUTY. 

and beauty will be recognized and confessed by 
all who see it in our time, is a task which may 
well wring from the lips even of an inspired apos- 
tle the despairing cry, " Who is sufficient for these 
things ? " And yet it is not an impossible work, 
for a religion that is inadequate to meet the de- 
mands of any phase or epoch of civilization is a 
partialism. It is certainly the work given the 
Church of this age to do. Let me devote the 
brief moments that are left me to the indication 
of two conspicuous characteristics of the religion 
that will have glory and beauty in the esteem 
even of this doubting and world-worshiping gen- 
eration. 

And first of all it must be a religion in which 
supernaturalism is the supreme factor of power. 
The general trend of modern speculation has 
been towards the elimination of that element from 
human faith. Sometimes openly and sometimes 
disguised, a strange but strong attempt is being 
made to legislate God out of the world. The 
attack onsupernaturalism comes from all quarters 
and is directed to all points. Sometimes it is the 
scientist, with his babble about the sufficiency of 
cosmic laws. Sometimes it is the extreme evolu- 
tionist, with his order of development, asserting 



GLOBY AXD BEAUTY. 189 

that this infinite something of the universe grows 
in course of nature out of absolute nothing. 
Sometimes it is the moralist, with his sublime con- 
fidence in pure ethics. Sometimes it is the doc- 
trinal iconoclast, making blind and furious assault 
upon venerable and approved truths, attempting 
to efface their comeliness and degrade them in 
the esteem of men. Sometimes it is the biblical 
critic, eager to impair the integrity of Scripture 
as a revelation from God by tilting here and there 
a block from its place, or disintegrating with 
suspicion the substance of some foundation stone, 
or, bent on thorough work, lowering the entire 
Word to the plane of naturalism, where it finds 
the Old Testament a fraud and the Xew Testa- 
ment a commonplace. Sometimes it is the over- 
worked and underpaid laboring-man who finds it 
hard to reconcile his weariness and wretchedness 
with the superintendence of a divine Father. 
Sometimes it is the fool who says in his heart, 
w There is no God." These all are but different 
pluses of the modern crusade against the super- 
natural. It is because the Christian Church has 
so feebly opposed that crusade, because it lias so 
often grounded arms at the challenge of some 
sophistry, because with measureless infamy it has 



190 GLOBY AND BEAUTY. 

kept the flag of the cross over its head as its en- 
sign, while it outraged and trampled under foot 
the most signal truths for Avhich Christ lived and 
died. It is therefore that so much of glory and 
beauty has vanished from Christianity in the 
esteem of the men of to-day, and religion can 
never regain that lost splendor and attractiveness, 
until it re-asserts, and that with no obscurity of 
phrase, that it is not the product of man's 
thinking and planning, but the very will and way 
of God. 

Do you say that the remedy is impossible ? that 
matters have progressed too far to allow of arrest? 
that tidal waves of thought never revert upon 
themselves? That depends upon whether abso- 
lute truth is behind the wave of thought, supply- 
ing it with force and volume. Modern unbelief is 
essentially the product of speculation, not the 
answer to the deep interior demands of the soul. 
It is shallow, superficial, abnormal, out of adjust- 
ment to the constitution of man. Speculation 
inflates its thin and glittering bubbles of theory, 
but when they come into collision witli the in- 
stincts of human nature, they collapse, and of all 
their substance nothing remains but a shred of 
foam that is blown away into space. There is that 



GLOBY AND BEAUTY. 191 

in us, and it can not be got out of us, which is 
not satisfied with matter and motion, with things 
tangible and sensible. There is music in the wind 
and music in the wire, and when the wind 
breathes upon the wire the hidden melody finds 
voice and the air is vibrant with sweetness. 
There is immortality in man, and God outside 
the man, and when God breathes upon the man 
his sublimer convictions and longings find voice, 
and his inmost nature, which is supernature, 
utters itself in the psalm which is both creed and 
prayer, " As the hart panteth after the water 
brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. 
My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: 
When shall I come and appear before God?" 
Napoleon understood human nature when he said 
to his assembled counselors, " Gentlemen, if there 
is no God, we must create one." Religion is 
committing slow suicide when it lets go its grip 
on the supernatural or pauperizes its utterances 
in regard to it. A church that is parenthetical in 
its faith or statement concerning the unseen and 
the spiritual should make haste to purchase a 
shroud and arrange for burial: for unless it 
makes provision itself for decent obsequies, it will 
sooner or later be cast out into the potter's field 



192 GLOBY AND BEAUTY. 

of popular contempt. This is not reckless vapor- 
ing or ecclesiastical cant. It is the sober truth 
which the verdict of all history supports. 

The age of crucial experiment is passed. There 
have been scores of materialistic religions in the 
world, and the record of them in the scholar's 
library is all the dust of them which remains. 
There have been ethical religions, but while they 
have been to a limited degree practical, they have 
uniformly been prosaic, with a certain charm for 
philosophic minds, but utterly impotent to stir 
the common thought and mold the common life. 
It is the solemn responsibility of the Church of 
to-day to reestablish the supremacy of the super- 
natural in religion. It must lay less stress upon 
the spirit of the times and abandon the weakness 
of courting the popular favor by acquiescing in 
the popular mood. It must be guarded in its 
approval of hypercriticism, that may turn out to 
be spiritual dissent disguised in the scholar's 
cloak. It must erect fewer altars of worship to 
the latest novelty in theology. It must not mis- 
take sound for sense, and judge of the merits of 
a creed by the vociferousness of its adherents. It 
must have simple faith in God and in his word, 
and in the sufficiency of the provisions of grace, 



GL OR Y AXD BE A UT Y. 193 

and in the actuality of the spiritual world and the 
supremacy of spiritual forces, and in the reality of 
a heavenly kingdom whose builder and maker is 
not man, whose foundations are now being laid, 
and whose perfection will be reached when super- 
natural agencies have finished their supernatural 
work. And so the religion which it teaches and 
illustrates will be accepted as the interpretation 
of God to man, and so, and then, on all its institu- 
tions and offices and services will lie the splendor 
of the divine glory, and all its requirements and 
restraints and provisions will be instinct and artic- 
ulate with the beauty of the divine righteousness. 
The other essential to glory and beauty in 
religion is a wide range of practical efficiency: 
a readiness of adaptation to all the growing de- 
mands of humanity and a sufficiency with which 
to answer them. It has often been the mistake 
of what called itself Christianity that it lias kept 
itself aloof from the real life-struggles in which 
the majority of men are engaged. Sometimes it 
has been held that religion was too sacred a tiling 
to take down into the competitions of business 
and into the dust of labor, and pious energy has 
spent itself in rearing cathedrals and elaborating 
rituals. Sometimes it has been held that the 



194 globy and beauty. 

office of religion is so special that it is incapaci- 
tated from assisting in the solution of the prob- 
lems that constantly arise in an advanced and 
complicated civilization ; and so, while its ability 
to formulate theologies is admitted, its adequacy 
to settle vexed questions of social life is denied. 
If those theories were ever tenable, they are no 
longer so. If religion is not both qualified and 
commissioned to advise in matters of public con- 
cern, if it has no opinion to express in regard to 
the administration of government and no power 
to back its opinion, if it has no Decalogue and 
Sermon on the Mount applicable to the conduct 
of business, if it has nothing to say with reference 
to communism, and the vexed questions of labor 
and unjust social discriminations that fill the air 
with storm, nay more, if it has not a hand of 
power to thrust into this snarl of difficulties and 
help the wronged and the weak to their rights, 
it will have neither glory nor beauty in the popu- 
lar esteem. And it ought not to have. There is 
no inadequacy in Christianity. The carpenter's 
Son, who came to proclaim " peace on earth and 
good will to men," has made provision for all 
ranges and measures of human want. Social de- 
mands can never be in excess of the sufficiency 



GLOBY AXD BEAUTY. 195 

of the gospel. But that limited conception and 
that partial employment of religion, that holds it 
removed from the sphere of common life, receives 
and deserves condemnation. The age of monas- 
ticism is past. The Christ of the cloister and the 
school is dumb and powerless. The efficient 
Christ of to-day must move about among the 
homes and haunts of men, as he visited of old the 
dwellings of Bethany and walked the streets of 
Jerusalem with his criticisms upon business, and 
his counsel to soldiers, and his rebuke of hypocrisy 
in high places, and his defiance of unjust govern- 
ment, and his infinite compassion for the poor and 
the oppressed, and his teaching of social right- 
eousness as the short, straight way out of social 
complications. The glory and beauty of religion 
is to be secured b} r methods of administration 
adapted to meet the pressing practical wants of 
the age in which we live. The beauty of utility 
is better for religion and commends it more highly 
to the favor of the world than philosophic exact- 
ness of doctrinal statement or aesthetic and artistic 
rituals of worship. 

Brethren of the ministry, it is upon us that the 
chief charge is laid in this matter. Under the old 
dispensation it was for Aaron the priest that the 



196 GLORY AND BEAUTY. 

holy garments for glory and for beauty were to be 
made. And under the new dispensation it is upon 
the ministry that it is specially incumbent so to 
grasp the central thought of religion, and so to 
magnify it and proclaim it that its true glory and 
beauty may be evident in the eyes of the multi- 
tude. In our purpose and methods we are to get 
out of the literary ease of the study and go after 
men. It is better to be a Nimrod, a mighty hunter 
before the Lord, than a Solomon dreaming and 
mourning by turns in his ivory palace. We 
accomplish more by flaming like fiery prophets, 
with the message " Thus saith the Lord " on our 
lips, than by inditing some love-sick canticles or 
formulating the dreary ethics of a modern Book 
of Ecclesiastes. A live gospel for living men is 
the truth with which Ave are entrusted, and the 
utterance of that truth with the earnestness of 
profound conviction is the only thing that can 
clothe the modern ministry with "glory and 
beauty " in the esteem of a careless and worldly 
generation. 



X. 
%>tbtox to t^e anotlD. 



X. 

DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 

"lam debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the 
wise and to the foolish. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to 
preach the gospel to you also that are in Borne."— Romans 
1 : 14, 15. 

"T^RINCIPLES never seem so impressive as 
-*- when they are seen concreted and opera- 
tive in the life of some eminent man. A con- 
clusion of truth may be logically faultless, but it 
gets flame and edge only when it is at work. 
Paul the dialectician is a man whose thoughts 
are to be trusted ; but Paul the apostle, in the 
thick of his fight with the world's sin, is a man 
whose convictions kindle and glow with the white 
heat of inspirations. The worth of what he be- 
lieved and asserted is best measured by what his 
belief made of him and enabled him to do. We 
listen reverently to his words as a servant of 
Jesus Christ, but those teachings grow solid with 
reality when we see how the assurance of their 
truth wrought in him, changing the whole tenor 
of his life, subsidizing every energy of his nature, 

199 



200 DEBTOB TO THE WOULD. 

transforming the acuteness of his pagan culture 
into a sword-blade for the defence and furtherance 
of the gospel, making suffering for Christ's sake a 
sweet experience, and enabling him to match his 
robust, because sanctified, manhood successfully 
against the evil and darkness of his age. What 
Paul said he said because he knew and felt and 
illustrated the truth of what he said. He and his 
doctrine were so thoroughly part and counterpart 
of each other that he was a " word made flesh." 
The gospel of his faith reproduced itself in the 
gospel of his life, and so gave the world the best 
warrant of the genuineness and power of the truth 
he proclaimed. In perceiving what was admirable 
and matchless in him, we are really seeing how 
matchless and admirable is the gospel that, incar- 
nating itself in him, transformed the bold blas- 
phemer into the wonderful preacher of righteous- 
ness. 

Now there can be no question as to Paul's right 
to be held up as the ideal missionary. There are 
many brilliant names on the long and always 
lengthening roll of those who have been conspic- 
uous for their self-sacrifice and success in preach- 
ing the gospel to "the regions beyond." The 
luster of their character pierces the murk and 



DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 201 

shadows of the common worldliness as the stars 
pour radiance through rifts in the clouds and 
burn brighter by contrast. These adventurous 
champions of the faith have been men of whom 
the world was not worthy. No remoteness of dis- 
tance, no difficulty of transit, no hardships or dan- 
gers have hindered them from their errand. They 
have gone every- where preaching the Word. 
Their feet have been beautiful on all mountains, 
bringing glad tidings. All deserts have felt their 
transforming touch, beneath which Saharas bud 
and blossom as the rose. They have sown beside 
all waters. Where Lebanon spins from her dis- 
taffs of snow the white-threaded rivers that 
broider the verdant hem of her garments ; where 
Abana and Pharpar go softly, their quiet laughter 
only making more slumbrous the endless summer 
that sleeps in the groves of Damascus ; on the banks 
of the Nile, that pours its tawny ilood through the 
graves of a dead land ; on Pacific islands, stray chil- 
dren of the continent ; among the icebergs of the 
frozen north ; under the blazing belt of the equator; 
in the shadow of the pagoda : in the bark hut of the 
Indian and the kraal of the Zulu, — every-where 
these men and messengers of God have found their 
way. It has cost them something. They have 



202 DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 

panted, fevered with thirst, in the heat of the Syrian 
noon ; they have battled with famine and pestilence 
in Harpoot ; they have been shot down by Turkish 
marauders ; they have sickened and died in the 
malarial airs of pitiless Africa. It was a bitter 
price to pay for their calling, but these men and 
women have paid it without a murmur. They 
have said a long good-by to home and friends 
from the deck of the retreating ship, and have 
faded out of sight of home with a smile upon 
their faces. With their own hands they have 
turned up the sod under which to bury their 
children, and have made no complaint against 
God. They have seen the sky grow dark above 
them as the light of their own lives was waning, 
and instead of the voices of sympathizing friends, 
heard only the babel of the curious and chattering 
crowd who had gathered to see them die, and yet 
were confident, and often triumphant. Let the 
world make up the roll of its heroes, and their 
exploits dwindle when measured with the record 
of these missionaries of Christ. To be foremost 
among them is to be a king over kings. To stand 
as Paul stands, the undisputed leader of the great 
missionary host, is to occupy the highest place of 
earthly honor, 



DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 203 

Now this ideal missionary has confided to us 
the secret of his eminence. It was not due to 
exceptional natural abilities, though unquestion- 
ably he possessed them, and exercised under other 
conditions and along other lines they would have 
made him famous. His particular success was a 
specialty. He had certain convictions and certain 
inspirations of purpose which God gave and God 
used to make of him an irresistible power for 
righteousness. It is the always fresh wonder of 
divine grace that it can utter itself through men 
in whatever phrase it will in spite of the baldness 
of their natural capacity. 

" The coarsest reed that trembles in the marsh, 
If heaven select it for its instrument, 
May shed celestial music on the breeze 
As clearly as the pipe whose golden tip 
Befits the lip of Phoebus." 

It is not what men are by birth so much as what 
they are by choice that determines their record. 
Those who inquire after the laws that are sover- 
eign in the realm of redemption, and submit them- 
selves implicitly to them, are sure to become kings 
and priests unto God. 

If we examine the text, which may be con- 



204 DEBT OB TO THE WORLD. 

sidered as the summary of Paul's scheme of life, 
certain salient points are discovered which, either 
as motive or method, were concerned in his suc- 
cess. They were not local and temporary, and so 
merely historical. They have room and oppor- 
tunity to work in all ages, and never more freely 
and efficiently than in our time. The mission- 
aries of to-day who are facing the exigencies and 
difficulties of their high calling can gain no more 
profitable knowledge than Paul's conception of 
the office ; can get no more intense and enduring 
enthusiasm than he found in the feelings and con- 
victions that inspired and sustained him in his 
work. 

Note, then, — 

I. — PAUL HAD A GOSPEL TO PREACH. 

He was an acute philosopher, versed in all the 
subtleties of the schools : but he did not devote 
his life to metaphysical speculations. He was an 
accomplished pupil in the intricacies of Jewish 
ritualism, but he had no time to waste in propa- 
gating formalism. He had found a gospel, a mes- 
sage of glad tidings from above, the wisdom of 
God and the power of God unto salvation, and 
he was so impressed and possessed by it that he 



DEBTOR TO THE WOULD. 205 

longed for nothing so ardently as to give it utter- 
ance, to be its voice crying in the wilderness of 
men's spiritual needs. He was a not a modern 
critic, — inquisitorial, sarcastic, incredulous, whose 
creed was a maximum of words and a minimum of 
doctrine, — but he "knew whom he had believed, 
and w T as persuaded that he was able to keep that 
which he had committed unto him." His views 
of truth were positive, not tentative. He did not 
lay sheriff hands on the stern utterances of revela- 
tion and arrest them for obtaining credence under 
false pretences. He accepted the gospel in all its 
phases as from God. Its mountains of transfigu- 
ration, its gloomy Gethsemanes, its blood atone- 
ment, its single condition of salvation, the glory 
of its heavenly city and the darkness of its endless 
night, he thoroughly believed in them all, and 
wrought with the enthusiasm of his conviction. 
Men were perishing ; men might be rescued ; and 
so, though the Jews required a sign, and the 
Greeks sought after knowledge, he preached 
Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block 
and to the Greeks foolishness. The casuistry of 
the schools and the criticism of the sidewalk were 
alike nothing to him. As Ulysses sailed past the 
island of the sirens, chanting the praises of the 



206 DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 

immortal gods so loudly that all the bewitching 
songs that were wafted from the shore seemed 
only empty noise, so Paul had a conviction and 
a possession of the gospel that neither praise nor 
blame could disturb. His theology mastered him, 
spoke from his lips, breathed from his life, was 
the atmosphere with which he walked encompassed. 
His utter faith in its truth and his intense enthu- 
siasm for its truth made him the fiery and irresist- 
ible messenger of the gospel. 

And no man who doubts, and no church which 
questions, the truth of Scripture can have large 
missionary enthusiasm. If the gospel is not 
accepted in its simplicity and its comprehensive- 
ness, in its length and breadth and height and 
depth, with all its assertions and inferences, its 
lights and its shadows, there is an essential lack 
of fitness for the work of the world's evangeliza- 
tion. This world can not be molded into right- 
eousness by half-believers. Men whose minds 
are a chemist's laboratory, in which they pulverize 
and dissolve and distill and evaporate the truths 
of the gospel, in the hope of crystallizing a creed 
that shall have no sharp angles and no unwelcome 
flavor, have no chance with paganism, which is 
positive, if nothing else. It is when the gospel 



DEBT OB TO THE WOULD. 207 

of God, and God in his gospel is sovereign in the 
esteem of the Church, that it becomes an irresisti- 
ble preacher of the truth. A missionary church 
has no use for surmises and parentheses. It must 
know whereof it affirms, and speak because it can 
not but speak the things which it has seen and 
heard. The Church of God gets no leverage on 
the world unless it has for its fulcrum the convic- 
tion, held without evasion or reservation, that the 
Scriptures, the whole Scriptures, and nothing but 
the Scriptures, are the Word of life. And when 
it carries that word to men the first essential of 
success is unquestioning, honest, personal confi- 
dence in it. 

II. — PAUL HAD AX ADEQUATE CONCEPTION OF 
HIS RESPONSIBILITY. 

I put emphasis on that word adequate, for it 
expresses a mental and moral state in which are 
largely found the hidings of the apostle's power. 
As a rule, how much men will do for the world 
depends to a very considerable extent upon how 
much they think the world has a right to claim 
from them. The affluent souls who never calcu- 
late, but, like prodigal nature, give because it is 
the law of their being to give, are rare. There 



208 DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 

is a reserve of selfishness in most men that makes 
duty and sacrifice in part a matter of moral arith- 
metic. They must be convinced before they con- 
tribute. Their consciousness of responsibility will 
largely determine the measure of their actual con- 
secration. They are conscientious ; they will 
withhold nothing that is due from them, but they 
are saving ; they will not spend themselves unless 
some claim for that spending can be established. 
And the danger is, the common mistake is, that 
the rate of responsibility is put too low. Men 
exaggerate their right of withholding, and dispute 
the demands made upon them for outlay ; and so, 
while meaning to be honest, sometimes unwittingly 
rob God. 

The question of responsibility for the conversion 
of the world is often discussed on too low a level. 
The spiritual destitution of a vast part of hu- 
manity is recognized ; the duty of the Church to 
meet it in some measure is admitted. At the 
same time the extent of our obligation to remote 
areas and alien nations is a problem, and a com- 
plicated one. The Church often, in our times pre- 
eminently, seems like the band of Thermopylae, a 
handful opposed to a multitude. There is flame 
and fury enough of battle within arm's length. It 



DEBTOB TO THE WOULD. 209 

is a marked characteristic of our modern civiliza- 
tion that in proportion as what we call its tri- 
umphs multiply, its spiritual necessities increase, 
or at least become more evident. It is our boast, 
and not an empty one, that nineteenth century 
Christendom is the highest tide level of history. 
Anglo-Saxon civilization in particular is a splendid 
blossoming of the possibilities of humanity. In 
enterprise and enthusiasm and achievement indus- 
trial, intellectual, and beneficent, there has been 
magnificent advance. Our swift pace shames the 
slow creeping of earlier times. If we look at only 
one side of current life it seems as if the millennial 
day had already begun to dawn. And yet in what 
wonderful contrast to all this are the colossal shad- 
ows that deepen as the light intensifies. Rome 
never heard such a wail as i; the bitter cry of out- 
cast London." The problems raised by the swarm- 
ing and motley life of our great cities are at least 
in their recognized urgency essentially modern. 
The sunlight that gilds the mountain-tops reveals 
the morasses as well. If we recognize more tonic 
in the air we have grown conscious also of more 
miasma. The want around our own door-stones, 
the perils that threaten our own churches, the 
evils that thrust themselves upon our notice in 



210 DEB TOE TO THE WORLD. 

our land, malignant, portentous, gigantic — have 
we not enough and more than enough on our 
hands in dealing with them ? How can it be 
competent to press the claims of remote conti- 
nents ? Why should we project our energies to 
telescopic distances when woe and want and sin 
incredible are riotous and clamorous within micro- 
scopic nearness ? 

Now Paul cut all these knotted problems with a 
single stroke, and found an answer to all perplex- 
ing questions in what to him was a sovereign fact: 
,; I am debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, 
both to the wise and to the foolish." It is not 
a question of careless generosity on my part, nor 
merely a question of comparative philanthropy : 
but this lost and dying world has a bill against 
me and is urgent for payment. As a steward of 
the gospel. I have put into my hands and in trust 
the bread to satisfy all this hunger, the medicine 
for all this sickness, the power that can still 
this bitter wail of sorrow and sin that goes up 
day and night from palace and hovel, from shop 
and street, from all places where men live and 
suffer, and I am debtor. Necessity is laid upon 
me to administer this trust. Woe is me if I 
preach not the gospel, not in the nearest place, 



DEBT OB TO THE WOBLD. 211 

not where I can do it the easiest and with best 
care for myself, but where it will sound the loud- 
est, be heard the farthest, save the most. All 
other questions are babble and noise compared 
with the sovereign question : How shall I dis- 
charge the responsibility that weights me down 
in the fact - I am debtor." 

Is it unfair to say that often, nowadays, respon- 
sibility for missionary work is too much a matter 
of sentiment and too little an invincible convic- 
tion? too largely a halfway conclusion half- 
heartedly reached by a limping and cold series 
of arguments ; too little a consciousness of duty 
kindled into a consuming heat in a soul respon- 
sive to the touch of God? On our lower planes 
of consecration Paul's conception of responsibility 
may seem exaggerated, but was it in fact ? To 
what extent may a lost world rightfully press its 
claims upon a Church that has. and has in trust, 
a gospel of salvation ? That Church can hardly 
content itself with home work while the air over 
Olivet is still vibrant with the words of the great 
-ion : " Go ye into all the world, and preach 
the gospel to y creature." It can not drug 

: into apathy with the creed that human d 
is nut after all so imminent, and that the other side 



212 DEBT OB TO THE WOBLD. 

the vail divine mercy will do what Christian faith- 
lessness has left undone, else why the tireless zeal 
of apostles, and the fire that flames in the words 
of evangel and epistle, and the high symbol 
of the Apocalypse, the angel having the everlast- 
ing gospel, hurrying on swift wrings to all lands 
to anticipate Judgment Day and the end of all 
things ? This is not a matter to be disposed of 
with a simple disclaimer. The question of respon- 
sibility is in court, and the Church must face it 
and meet it, not with pettifogging and special 
pleading, but in the loyal spirit that asks and pre- 
pares to be obedient to the answer to the ques- 
tion: " Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" 

Beyond all controversy right views of responsi- 
bility are imperative, and are the forerunners and 
prophecy of great achievements. The church that 
has them is impatient of routine and commonplace. 
It gets spiritual vision and grows inventive, that 
it may be ready for the multiplying demands that 
press upon it. It becomes prudent of time, keen 
to discern occasion, alert to improve opportunity, 
every power pressed into service. In the old 
mythology Atlas was the giant of giants, his feet 
planted on some nether world, his head towering 
to the stars ; but when he was pictured as carrying 



DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 213 

the globe it was with bowed shoulders, bent form, 
every muscle tense under the load. And when 
the Church is mastered by the conviction that to 
the extent of its capacity it is responsible for the 
world, there will inevitably result the mustering 
of every available force, every sinew and fiber 
of strength will be braced to sustain the weight, 
every faculty and energy will be mobilized and 
work along one line of endeavor. And nothing 
human is mightier than the concentrated working 
of a cultured, consecrated, fully developed, con- 
sciously responsible Christian manhood and woman- 
hood. It attempts great things, may expect great 
things, and will not be disappointed. There is no 
truth ever learned, no experience ever felt, that 
carries with it such inspiration and promise of 
success as the conviction and the confession, " I 
am debtor." 

III. — PAUL WAS WILLING TO MEET THE 
DEMANDS MADE UPON HIM. 

He intelligently surrendered himself to his 
life-work. More clearly than most men he 
recognized the exhaustiveness of the claims that 
were being pressed. The Greek and the barbarian, 
the wise and the foolish, had plead their cause 



214 DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 

with him, and his answer to them had been, " I 
am your debtor/' And now Rome and the vast 
empire of which Rome was the representative was 
calling for his presence and help, and to these 
accumulating demands his response was, " I am 
ready." He makes no excuse of overwork 
already. He dismisses without a word the diffi- 
culty of a long and dangerous voyage. He rec- 
ognizes his opportunity as his commission, and his 
whole consecrated manhood utters itself in the 
single sentence, " I am readj^." 

It is safe to augur great things from such a 
disposition as that on the part of the Christian 
Church. Unwilling work is always half-done 
work, but enthusiasm even in a bad cause is sure 
of its victories. It is the fire and hammer that 
breaks the flintiest rock in pieces. It is a large 
advantage gained when the assent of the heart 
keeps company with the decision of the will. 
Purpose is the body, but feeling is the soul, of 
consecration. The constraints of conscience can 
never match in efficiency the inspirations of love. 

And if the Church is to do successful missionary 
work it must have always in its heart, as well as 
on its lips, the words " I am ready." Nor must it 
omit to range with them those other words of the 



DEBTOB TO THE WOULD. 215 

apostle, " As much as in me lies." " As much as in 
us lies, we are ready. We are heartily enlisted 
in this enterprise. All that we have and all that 
we are is freely and joyfully placed at its service 
— hands to work for it, feet to run for it, 
head to think for it, heart to feel for it. 
Soul and body, time and energy, capacity and 
possessions, these all shall be given to it gladly, 
unreservedly, and forever." 

The beginnings of this complete consecration 
are of course wrought by the Spirit of God, but 
its culture and growth are effected by human 
agencies. The readiness to spend and be spent 
for the evangelization of the world increases in 
proportion as the reality of the need and the pos- 
sibilities of the work press vividly upon the 
thought, and the understanding of these comes 
through minute acquaintance with the facts. 
However grace reigned in the apostle's soul, who 
can doubt that his enthusiasm kindled as he 
enumerated in thought the splendors of the impe- 
rial city, and saw how, under the glitter and pomp 
of externals, vice and squalor and wretchedness 
were eating out the life of society, and then 
remembered that the gospel of which he was the 
messenger was mighty enough to arrest all this 



216 DEB TOE TO THE WOULD . 

rot of evil, so that purity and righteousness should 
be at the heart of things, and Capitoline and 
Tiber and Forum should get their chief glory 
from the light of God that lay on them all. 
Beyond question, the actual and the possible of 
Rome, what was and what might be, the foul fad- 
ing into the fair like the dissolving views of the 
optician's lantern, were often before the apostle's 
mental eye, and so quickened his zeal that it 
uttered itself in the announcement : " So, as much 
as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you 
that are at Rome also." Some such panoramic 
views of the need and promise of the work should 
be a part of the education of the Church in mis- 
sionary zeal. They have wonderful power. I sat 
awhile ago in a council assembled to ordain as 
missionary a young man who had for some years 
been a teacher in Micronesia. The candidate read 
his statement of belief, and then, instead of the 
usual formula of theological inquisition, there fol- 
lowed questionings as to how he taught this and 
that doctrine to the natives and how they received 
it. To most of us Micronesia had been only a 
station of the American Board, or at best only a 
few blotches of black on a wall-map. But as the 
narrative of the candidate went on, the blankness 



DEBT OB TO THE WOULD. 217 

of the canvas gave place to the blue of the 
Pacific ; the ugly blotches changed to coral 
islands rising above the waves, clasping in their 
circling sweep the quiet lagoons. There was the 
waving of the palm-trees and the fragrance of 
tropical blossoms. The nebulous indistinctness 
resolved itself into groups of eager worshipers, 
assembling to listen to the Word of God. We 
caught the flash of their bright-colored garments, 
heard the songs of Zion in their unknown tongue, 
saw the look on their devout, upturned faces. 
The some what had changed to the some thing ; 
the unknown had become the known, and from 
every man's heart there was the upleaping to 
every man's lips of the words, " So, as much as in 
me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that 
are at Micronesia also." When the actuality of 
the need and the possibilities of the work 
changed from abstractions to living realities, 
enthusiasm was inevitable. 

And the means of quickening a vivid concep- 
tion of the largeness of the work, and of fanning 
into fervor a zeal for its accomplishment, are 
within easy reach of the modern Church. Within 
the last quarter of a century a distinctively mis- 
sionary literature has grown up which finds its 



218 DEBTOB TO THE WOULD. 

way to the home and hand of every man who is 
willing to receive it. The secular press has recog- 
nized the situation, and in the same issue in which 
it records the rise and fall of stocks and merchan- 
dise it chronicles the victories and hopes of the 
Church of God in the remotest lands. The geog- 
rapher maps out for us the conformation of the 
pagan world ; the ethnologist instructs us in its 
race peculiarities ; the artist pictures for us in 
graphic sketches the beauties and wonders of its^ 
natural scenery and the groups and incidents 
of its strange social and religious life ; scholarly 
reviews discuss the necessity and the best meth- 
ods of evangelistic work. Heathendom may be, 
and ought to be, as present and well comprehended 
a reality to the Christian Church as the condition 
of a neighboring commonwealth. The facilities 
for knowledge are numberless ; nothing but indif- 
ference or blindness can keep us in ignorance. 

And certainly the Church of to-day ought to 
find immense inspiration in the fact that the work 
of Christian missions has passed beyond the ten- 
tative and timid stage. The evangelization of the 
world is no longer a possibility to be tested. The 
history of three quarters of a century has demon- 
strated that it is an ideal which can be realized. 



DEBTOB TO THE WOULD. 219 

There is wonderful difference between to-day and 
that yesterday of 1812. In February of that 
year the first missionaries of the American Board 
were ordained in the city of Salem. It was the 
launching of what was considered to be a doubt- 
ful experiment. An immense audience witnessed 
the impressive scene. The students of the theo- 
logical seminary walked from Andover twenty 
miles away, and back again at night. The sur- 
rounding towns were largely represented in the 
gathering. But the spectacle was that of a 
funeral rather than a festival. Dr. Woods, of 
Andover. the preacher, seemed weighted down 
with the sorrow of the occasion. In his closing 
remarks, he said: "Dear young men, I will not 
break your hearts and my own by dwelling on the 
affecting circumstances of this parting scene. If 
you must go, I will animate and comfort you. 
Remember that though we must leave you He 
whom your soul loveth will not, and at the glori- 
ous appearing of the Son of God we hope to see 
you dearly beloved, and those whom you may 
rescue from pagan darkness, at His right hand.' 1 
There was a gloom overhanging all the services, 
a grief in every heart. The doxology was a wail 
and the benediction sounded like a miserere. 



220 DEBTOR TO THE WORLD. 

It is our happiness, and our responsibility as 
well, that we live in times when the uncertainty 
of beginnings is a thing of the past. The success 
of Christian missions is an assured and resplend- 
ent fact. These thousands who have come up 
from all parts of the land are assembled for a 
jubilee. The music of the hour is the sound of 
festival trumpets. All continents and peoples are 
here represented. Swart Africa with her tawny 
mantle of desert and shaggy girdle of mountains, 
who has looked out of large sad eyes for 
deliverance since the age of the Pharaohs, and 
Japan the hermit nation, and opulent China long 
shut up in the enclosure of her sacred wall, and 
Moslemdom that has had no light for centuries 
but that of the pale crescent, and torrid India 
and Oceanica, with its kingdom of mosaic — all 
bring greetings and testimonies to the saving 
power of the gospel. Men are not asked to-day 
to enlist in a "forlorn hope" and risk all on a 
desperate venture. It is only to swell the ranks 
of an advancing and triumphant host. Out of 
Scripture, and current providence, and luminous 
history, and enlarging opportunities, the voice of 
God is summoning his Church — " Go ye into all 
the world." How can it bear, and how shall it 
dare, to be disobedient to the heavenly calling? 



XI. 



Stye ^>totte at t^e €)oor. 



XI. 

THE STONE AT THE DOOR. 

"And they were saying among themselves, Who shall roll us 
away the stone from the door of the tomb? and looking up, 
they see that the stone is rolled back." — Mark 16: 3,4. 

T I ^HERE is something pathetic and yet some- 
-*~ thing not altogether reasonable about the 
trouble of these women on their way to the place 
where Jesus Christ was buried. They had serious 
occasion for sorrow and fear. The man whom 
they had followed so long, who had conquered 
their respect by his character and secured their 
confidence by his wonderful teachings, and wound 
his way into their affections by his gentleness and 
tenderness, and had so centered upon himself the 
loyalty of their heads and hearts that they had 
come to believe in him devoutly and entirely as 
God's promised Messiah who was to deliver them 
from civil bondage and give them a place in the 
new kingdom which he was to establish — this 
man was dead, and had died in such a way as 
apparently emphasized the falsity of all that he 

223 



224 THE STONE AT THE DOOR. 

had ever agreed to do for them. They had 
reason enough for profoundest sorrow in this 
sudden and utter destruction of their hopes. 
Their life was hard enough at the best and the} r 
had made it harder by listening to him and join- 
ing their fortunes with his and so bringing upon 
themselves hatred and persecution and contempt. 
They could bear it bravely while they were 
cheered by great expectations, but these were 
all over now. The man in whom they trusted 
was dead and there was nothing for them to do 
but to go back to the old sad monotonous life of 
drudgery and dreariness, made all the heavier 
and cloudier by their disappointment. There 
was cause enough for grief in all this, and yet 
as we see them making their way to Christ's 
tomb their principal trouble seems to be that 
the door of the tomb is closed with a stone, and 
they do not see how they are to find a way of 
opening it to pay their last respects to the body 
of the man they loved. They may have silently 
thought or openly talked of their loss and shed 
bitter tears over their disappointment, but there 
is no record of it. Inspiration has preserved for 
us only the thought that was uppermost in their 
minds, the thought that found expression in the 



THE STONE AT THE DOOR. 225 

anxious question, " Who shall roll us away the 
stone from the door of the tomb?" 

And yet strange as that seems, how very 
human a thing it was. A man's latest trouble 
is usually the foremost thought in his mind. 
The freshness of a sorrow, in some respects and 
for a while, counts for more than its size. Some 
great calamity when it is past is quite put out 
of its place, in our estimate of it, by some new 
trial or vexation that is really quite insignificant 
in comparison. Time, with the changes it brings, 
has a wonderful effect in quieting or deadening 
the sensibilities. And that result does not argue 
the lack of deep and fine feeling. I think rather 
that it is a provision of the divine mercy put 
into our make-up to save us from being crushed 
by life's heavy loads which we are all appointed 
to bear. I know that there is power in human 
sympathy, and that to have the alleviations and 
light side of our troubles pointed out helps to 
make us submissive, but after all there is very 
little comfort given by comforting pure and 
simple. It falls on deaf ears and a dull heart. 
It is the thought of the new duty to be done, 
the edge of the fresli trial, the sound of another 
battle close at hand that stirs the thick blood in 



226 THE STONE AT THE DOOB, 

the sluggish veins, and makes us feel that there 
is still something for which we ought to be glad 
to live. How often you see that. Some mother 
is bowed with grief over the body of her dead 
child, irresponsive if not repellent of all attempts 
to console her. Loving words, kindly sympathy, 
great promises of God, how powerless they all 
are to comfort her. But let sickness of ever so 
slight a sort seize some other member of the 
family and what a change is wrought. The new 
fear crowds out the old fact. Her sensibilities 
gravitate away from the past toward the future, 
and her whole soul goes out in care and tender- 
ness for the fresh sufferer and through that 
strange channel relief comes to the soul. The 
mystery and mercy of the sorrow of life we do 
not half comprehend. Like the old palimpsest 
manuscripts, those strange sheets of parchment, 
on which first the scholar wrote his treatise, 
and over which by-and-by the artist spread his 
colors, blotting out the old record by the fresh 
tracings, and later the poet inscribed his lines, 
his poem hiding both painting and treatise ; the 
last enrollment was the thing men saw although 
all the rest were underneath. So these human ex- 
periences of ours lie in strata, one above another, 



THE 8TONS AT THE BOOR. 227 

the old sorrow covered and obscured with the 
new grief, and here and there an overlining of 
joy, and the latest handwriting of providence, 
though relatively light, still uppermost and face 
to face with as. It is infinite mercy, not human 
fickleness this. Past griefs if not tempered and 
new trials and duties and demands 
would be too much for us. The quick pressing 
is :r the mass of life's sorrows at 
any one instant would slay us as swiftly and 
surely as a thunderbolt. It was a good thing 
for the women on the way to the grave of their 
dead Christ that they were anxiously questioning, 
•• Wh shall roll us away the stone from the door 
of the tomb ? M It was not without a purpose 
either that inspiration preserved for us the record 
of that peculiar phase of their trouble. 

But the anticipated difficulty though it trou- 
bled them did not utterly dishearten them. They 
did not know who would roll them away the 
stone from the door of the tomb, but they did 
know where the tomb .d which way they 

must go to reach it, and whether the stone was 
rolled away or not would make no difference 
to them if they were not on the spot. Going 
back to Jerusalem would nut help matters. If 



228 THE STONE AT THE DOOB. 

they were in earnest in their purpose then it was 
their duty to advance just as far toward fulfilling 
it as they possibly could and not to cry halt 
until they were absolutely and hopelessly blocked. 
And so, brave, tender, faithful hearts, they keep 
on their anxious way, and when they come to 
the tomb the sun is risen, " and looking up, 
they see that the stone is rolled back." One 
step at a time they advance along the path of 
duty, and when the end of the road is reached 
the reward of their fidelity is greater than faith 
dared to anticipate. 

That is the whole science of living, packed 
into smallest possible compass. Difficulty present 
or prospective is to be overcome by doing known 
duty. This is a matter practical to every body. 
There are no unobstructed lives. Obstacles real 
or imaginary are always in the way, and often 
the imaginary ones give us the most trouble. 
There is no open sea and plain sailing. The 
channel is circuitous, shoals and reefs on the right 
hand and the left. There is sometimes a painful 
sense of insecurity, but there is no sin in that 
provided a man neither turns back in his course 
nor suffers himself to drift. There is always 
clear water at least a vessel's length ahead, and 



THE STONE AT THE DOOB. 229 

it is a man's first duty to cover that distance. 
It does one good to feel insecure, so far as that 
feeling makes him watchful and careful, but it 
is no excuse for not keeping on until he can 
absolutely go no further. And a Christian man 
has no reason, as he has no right, to be despond- 
ent. This life, that seems so thickset with difficul- 
ties, is the life appointed him by his Father and 
Redeemer, and God is faithful who will not suffer 
him to be tempted above that which he is able to 
bear, but will with the temptation make also the 
way of escape. That is universal law, the highest 
law of the highest love, applicable and operative in 
all exigencies large and small. A man is to do, 
not dream; to advance, not to anticipate. And one 
thing is certain, the man in the presence of actual 
difficulty, who, with simple trust in God, and 
with the brave spirit that says, " I will either 
find or make a way through it," keeps straight 
on, will either do it or have it done for him. 
And one other thing is certain, that in most cases 
when we march boldly toward our difficulties, 
in spite of our impulse to turn back, it will be 
found when we reach them that they are not so 
impassable as they seemed at a distance. The 
stone at the door of the sepulcher, which in our 



230 THE STOXE AT THE DOOR. 

thought of it would prevent our entrance, and 
which we were sure we had no strength to roll 
away, when we get to the sepulcher will be 
found not to be there at all. Coming westward 
across the Atlantic, the traveler, as he nears the 
Grand Banks, sees some morning ahead of him 
a gray wall rising up out of the sea stretching 
the whole diameter of the horizon, cold, hard, 
threatening, impenetrable, preventing all further 
progress. But as the ship keeps on her course 
toward it, gets nearer, at last touches it, it proves 
to be obscurity not solidity, mist not granite, 
and pushing her way into it, following the sailing 
track laid down on the chart, watching the com- 
pass and the lead, keeping a steady hand at the 
helm, the vessel pushes her way through it, and 
comes out on the other side into clear sunshine, 
and into sight of the blue shore -line of the 
continent lifting itself above the dip of the 
waves. And when men set their faces toward 
God, and move on in the divinely ordered course 
of their lives, many obstructions that seemed in 
the distance to be impassable, turn out in the 
actual encounter with them to be shadow, not 
substance, and faith and courage peer into them 
and through them, and come out beyond them 



THE STOXE AT THE DOOB. 231 

into the sparkle of the unclouded sea and into 
the serene and blessed experience of those of 
whom God says, u Well done, good and faithful 
servants." 

We ought specially to keep all this in mind 
in the matter of our spiritual difficulties. There 
are two things in particular which make it hard 
for men to enter or to go a great way in religious 
life. There are certain truths to be believed 
which they do not understand and they feel 
sure they never can understand; there are certain 
duties to perform which they do not do and they 
are sure they never can do. There is a stone 
before the door of the sepulcher, and they are 
not able to roll it away and get to their Lord. 
That is a very common state of mind. It is 
a real hindrance to many men ; it serves as an 
excuse for a great many others. And yet it 
ought not to be a least hindrance to one who 
sincerely desires to live a Christian life, and it 
certainly is not the shadow of an apology for 
indifference and inaction. There are some simple 
first things about which we are all of us perfectly 
sure. There is not a person here but knows 
as well as he knows any thing that he ought to 
do his utmost to be just as true and good as he 



232 THE STONE AT THE DOOR. 

possibly can, that day by clay he ought to ask 
God to help him understand his will, and help 
him be and do just what he ought to be and do, 
that he ought to study his Bible to find out what 
it teaches about the rules that should govern his 
conduct, and how he shall take care of his im- 
mortal soul, and make ready for that eternity 
into which all men haste. There is hardly a 
child here that can not understand that much, 
for it is nothing to understand but something 
very simple to do. And yet that is just what 
irreligious people have not done. They let it 
alone and talk about the difficulty they find in 
understanding and believing. I don't understand 
about inspiration, one man says, and I don't 
believe that the Bible is an inspired book. Has 
any body asked you to start with understanding 
and believing that? Do you own an inspired 
almanac ? But that does not hinder you from 
looking into it to find out what time the sun will 
rise to-morrow, or what day of the week the first 
of May comes, and you arrange your business 
accordingly. Yes, but you say, I have used the 
almanac a great many years and always found it 
correct. Precisely. Have you used your Bible 
a great many years and found out by your own 



THE STONE AT THE DOOB. 233 

experience that it is inaccurate? The matter of 
inspiration is not up for discussion just yet. The 
first question to be settled is whether the Bible 
is true or whether any thing in it is true, and 
that is only found out by putting it to the test 
of experiment. If a principle or rule is true, 
no matter where the truth came from, it is every 
honest man's business to put it into practice. 

Do you ask what all this has to do with the 
matter Ave are considering? It has every thing 
to do with it. It is our Lord's promise and the 
supreme law in his kingdom. " If any man will 
do his will, he shall know of the doctrine/' 
Every body can learn the truth in that way; 
no body can learn it in any other way. Let a 
man start out along that line, doing the things 
which are true and right, just as fast as he finds 
out what things are right and true, and because 
they are right and true, and all these mountains 
of difficulty in the shape of unintelligible doctrine 
will one after another vanish away. The doc- 
trine of regeneration which seem> to you so 
strange and obscure will cease to trouble you 
if you do what you certainly know how to do, — 
offer the prayer, u Create in me a clean heart, O 
God; and renew a right spirit within me." The 



234 THE STONE AT THE DOOB. 

mystery of the atonement is no longer a trou- 
blesome mystery when you do what you can 
simply and intelligently do, trust your single self 
with your weakness and ignorance and sin to the 
mercy of your Redeemer. 

The path of obedience is the path of gracious 
revelation. So the women found it. They an- 
ticipated difficulty at the door of the sepulcher, 
but all the same they kept on their way toward 
it, and when they reached tho dreaded spot the 
difficulty they foresaw was gone. It is always 
so in the religious life. The path of doing 
which leads to light may be very narrow and 
all shut in at the start, but it widens as we 
go on and opens broader prospect, and just 
as the mountaineer climbing upward finds the 
footpath through the tangle of underbrush and 
the thick -leaved woods a mere thread with 
nothing to see before or behind, or on either side 
but the path itself, but keeping on comes out at 
last on to the broad, bare ledges, where there is 
nothing to hide from his sight the broad land- 
scape below him or the great heavens above him, 
and his eye sweeps the vast expanse of earth 
beneath him where men sin and suffer and 
struggle and conquer, and the infinite sky over 
him, behind whose measureless azure are the 



THE STONE AT THE BOOB, 235 

domes and spires of the New Jerusalem of God, 
so the obedient soul content to do the little it 
knows now, and the more it will know to-morrow, 
is certain at last to reach the height where God's 
love and God's grace and God's truth, in its 
loftiest as well as its lowest ranges, will all be 
unrolled before it in panoramic clearness and 
splendor, and life and death and immortality will 
hold no secrets hidden from it, and the man shall 
see as he is seen, and know as he is known, and 
have a share in the illimitable wisdom of God. 

Just that which is true of this matter of be- 
lieving is also and equally true of that other 
great difficulty, the matter of living. Men con- 
sidering the question of personal religion look 
ahead and consider how much will be required 
of them if they enter upon the Christian life, 
and when they count up the sacrifices to be 
made, the duties to be done, the battles to be 
fought, the trials to be endured, the service to 
be rendered, the interminable series of demands 
of all sorts and sizes which will be pressed upon 
them, they say, " It is too much, we can never 
discharge tlie responsibility ; who is sufficient for 
these things? Certainly not we." Now there are 
two things to be said about that. One is that it 



236 THE STONE AT THE DOOM. 

is quite possible that not a single struggle, sacri- 
fice, demand, which we anticipate will ever form 
a part of our experience. The women were sure 
that thej 7 should find a great stone rolled against 
the door of the tomb, but when they reached the 
spot there was no stone there. God deals with 
us one by one. He fits the back to the burden 
and the burden to the back. The load which is 
too heavy for you. he will never ask you to carry; 
the trial too sharp for you, he will never call vou 
to endure. And this other thing also is to be 
said. In whatever we may have to do or endure, 
what is impossible to us will be done for us. 
There was a great stone at the door of Christ's 
tomb too heavy for the women to handle, and so 
Almightiness rolled it away before they reached it. 
Speculatively there are insuperable difficulties in 
the way of living the Christian life, but practically 
there are none — for we are workers together with 
God, who does the most of the work, working 
in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure. 
We misread the blessed significance of Christ's 
sepulcher, unless we think of that stone at its 
door, not as it was and where it was on the night 
after the crucifixion, but as it was and where it 
was on the morning of the resurrection. 



THE STOXE AT THE DOOR. 237 

But there is a still larger and more wonderful 
truth which the text teaches and this memorable 
day emphasizes. u And very early on the first 
day of the week, they come to the tomb . . . and 
looking up, they see that the stone is rolled back." 
Why was it rolled back ? All over the hill-slope 
adjacent to Joseph's garden were hundreds of 
tombs, and every one of them had a stone before 
its door. Some of them had been there a great 
while, and the cement of time had bolted door 
and tomb together, and wandering dust had 
sifted into the crevices, and the grasses had 
rooted themselves in it, and the wild vines had 
clambered over the gray rock, and which was 
tomb and which was door the eye could not 
distinguish. How happened it that that solitary 
stone among the multitudes was rolled away? 
Is there any answer but this — because the Lord 
whom it shut into the silence and darkness of 
death was risen to die no more? What were 
all other barriers to him when deatli itself could 
not hold him ? What was that rock-door to his 
resurrection power but the grain of dust in the 
path of the whirlwind? A half-score of men 
with the heave of their shoulders could roll away 
that stone, but all the generations of men that 



238 THE STOXE AT THE DOOR. 

had peopled the earth for four thousand years 
could not unloose one least finger of that grim 
death who had them all in his dread grasp. It 
was little for Him, the mighty Conqueror, to do, 
to make clear passage-way for himself into the 
outer world. 

So is it with ail hindrances and resistances that 
obstruct the chosen way of this risen Lord. 
Their stoutest opposition has not even the ob- 
structing force of a shadow. What infinite 
strength and comfort there is in that thought ! 
If you are a friend and disciple of Christ, you 
may be entirely at rest about yourself, even 
though men who do not know the hidings of your 
power may feel certain that you will be crushed 
by your sorrows and losses. Have you not abund- 
ant reason to say, " I can do all things through 
Christ which strengtheneth me " ? You need not 
be troubled about the permanence of his truth, 
though men snarl at it, criticize it, mangle it, 
distort it, boast of its overthrow, and seat on the 
throne of popular favor another gospel which is 
not His Gospel. The risen Christ lives in his 
truth, and one pulse-beat of his power which 
shook the dark kingdoms of the dead suffices to 
crush to dishonored and shapeless dust every 



THE STONE AT THE DOOR. 239 

Babel tower which the pride of human reason 
builds, with which to scale his heavens and make 
itself God. You need have no anxiety about the 
future of his kingdom, though the multitudes of 
the people love darkness and only a few rejoice 
in the light, though the kings of the earth set 
themselves, and the rulers take counsel together 
against the Lord and against his Anointed, 
though worldliness and greed and ambition and 
passion and hate and unbelief confederate to say 
to the rise of the mighty tide, Thus far shalt thou 
go and no farther, and here shall thy proud 
waves be stayed. One silent decree of Him who 
found the grave only a cobweb in the path of his 
purpose, and thrones crumble, and dynasties 
perish, and nations vanish like smoke ; one glance 
of his, and louder than the boom of the sea or 
the roar of the storm rises the clamor of the 
inhabitants of the earth crying, " Rocks fall upon 
us, hills cover us and hide us from the face of 
him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the 
wrath of the Lamb." Heaven and earth may 
pass away, but this risen Christ and his truth 
and his kingdom shall never pass away. 

And especially remember to-day that this risen 
Christ, who tasted death for every man, conquered 



240 THE STONE AT THE DOOR. 

death for every man. It is a strange and awful 
thing to die. There is no other presence in which 
we feel so helpless and hopeless. Still limbs, pale 
face, white lips, silent voice, rigid hands, sightless 
eyes, moveless heart, hushed house, closed coffin, 
slow procession, open grave, falling clods, decay 
and dust, — this is death. And we every one 
must die. How much of sweetest human hope 
and affection is hidden away to-day under the 
greening sods of the new spring-time ! Is there 
any power ? we ask in the agony of our infinite 
grief — is there any power that can give us back 
our beloved, or give us ourselves again to our- 
selves when we have gone as they have gone? 
And history answers, "no," and human reason 
answers, " no," and boastful science answers, 
" no," and the silence of the burial-places where 
our dead lie answers "no." The only voice of 
hope and comfort comes out from that solitary 
sepulcher on the hill-slope in Judaea, from whose 
door the stone has been rolled away. But what 
a voice that is, the voice of the mighty Con- 
queror who has himself trodden down death, 
and led captivity captive ! Listen to him you 
who are both mourners and mortals. " Because 
I live, ye shall live also." "I am the resurrection, 



THE STONE AT THE DOOR. 241 

and the life : he that believeth in me, though he 
were dead, yet shall he live : and whosoever liveth 
and believeth in me shall never die." Hear how 
holy apostles catch up and prolong the assurance, 
" For if we believe that Jesus died and rose 
again, even so them also that sleep in Jesus will 
God bring with him." " For we know that if 
the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, 
we have a building from God, a house not made 
with hands, eternal, in the heavens." Is there 
any light on the dark path? any hope for the 
dead and those who are soon to die ? Light ? 
there is broadest day and the splendor of out- 
poured sunshine ; hope ? there is more than hope, 
invincible assurance, " But now is Christ risen 
from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them 
that slept." 

There are many strange sights in this world of 
ours, but nothing so strange, I think, as to see 
men pressed with the cares and troubles of life, 
the dust of their beloved dead under their feet, 
their own graves close before them, and all eternity 
to follow, and yet indifferent or defiant in their 
attitude toward their Redeemer and Lord who 
died for their sins and was raised again for their 
justification ; men who are alike unmoved at the 



242 THE STONE AT THE DOOR. 

foot of the cross and the open door of the 
sepulcher. This thoughtlessness and recklessness 
and ingratitude, every-where about us, what is it 
all but the confirmation of the old saying of the 
gospel ? — "If they hear not Moses and the 
prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though 
one rose from the dead." 



njJBRARY OF CONGRESS | 

IIIIIIIIIIIIILf' 1 " 1 " 1 ( ' 



0021898 868 4 



